I have WinXP, Debian testing, and PCLinuxOS 2007 installed on this box. Earlier today, I was in Windows and (finally) let Microsoft Update install a new driver for my Realtek RTL8139C (PCI) NIC. Afterwards, everything worked in Windows, but in both Linux distros, there was no network connectivity.

Debian kept spitting out the following error message:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: transmit timed out
eth1: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1

You could sit there at the console and watch those messages occur over and over.

After various kernel parameters (involving acpi and apic) didn't work, and after I noticed my router indicated that there wasn't a 100 Mbps connection (except when in Windows), I went back to Windows and rolled back the driver to the previous version. And everything worked fine in Linux again.

Anyone have an experience remotely like this? Seems insane to blame a NIC problem in Linux on a Windows driver upgrade.

<edit> Just went through the whole driver update/rollback process again with the same (adverse) results in Linux after the update. (After the driver rollback, Windows thinks it's a TE100-PCBUSR 32-bit Cardbus PC Card. Oy. But it works.)

For driver updates its better to go to the manufacturer directly and for actual Windows updates Autopatcher.com is a better choice (download all of the updates at once (using your Linux system even) reboot once at the end not after every update and you can burn the installer to cd to do the update on other computers). Oh and if you look in the installed AP folder you can see all of the packages and checksum them as needed.

What you may be seeing is that the WU driver has set the card up in some weird way and when you reboot to linux its still setup funky (have you tried a full shutdown to cold then try Linux) also if you need an updated driver then just go to your OEMs site and use that one.

WU has been known to A break systems B install spyware

I don't need the NIC update from Windows; the card works fine, regardless of what Windows thinks it is. Figured I'd just do it because it was there, on offer.

Yes, I tried turning the system completely off and on again. (That was the first thing I tried.)