I have had a Win95 machine behind a Linux firewall for
sometime now and have never had a problem accessing
the internet. Recently, my Kingston NIC in the Win95
machine suffered a meltdown and had to be replaced.

I bought a new Netgear ISA card, installed it (with a little
trouble) and now Inet access through the Linux firewall
is almost interminably slow. All settings on the Win95 box
were restored to their pre-meltdown settings and the
Linux system has not changed one iota.

The linux box is a dual booter with Win2K and if I boot
into Win2K, windows networking seems to work with the
same speed as before. I don't use Windows connection
sharing, so I cannot compare Inet access.

I'm reasonably sure that the firewall is not the problem as it
has not changed from before even though I must use
MASQ instead of SNAT because of changing DHCP IP address
assignments from my cable modem ISP.

I have also optimized my MRU/MTU and other settings on
the Win95 box using cablenut which is how things were
before.

Everything seems to point a hardware problem, but I just
don't see what the problem could be. If anyone has any
suggestions, please let me know.