I got my Mandrake 9.2 Powerpack back in Jan '04 and sure enough, I had the same problem as the rest of the people with Nvidia nForce2 chipsets who posted here.

RobertoBech had problems recently:
http://linuxquestions.org/questions/history/129047

His thread referred to Poulpy's post here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/120308
It was very thorough and helped me solve my problem back in January.

Poulpy got the foundation of his info here:
Tripp Lilley wrote
http://perspex.com/hacks/linux/distr...ver-barfs.html

And here's where I come in. Tonight I reinstalled Mandrake 9.2 - complete reformat - onto my Shuttle box with AN41 mobo with Barton 2500+ and nForce2 chipset. As expected, eth0 wouldn't work. I remembered that I thought it was strange that after I replaced my kernel as described in the previous threads, the onboard eth0 worked, even without re-installing the nvidia drivers from source as described in the other threads.

This time I decided to try it without getting the new kernel. The four lines below are the entirety of the fix. It let me keep my Athlon kernel config (the other howto uses i586) and took maybe 2 minutes once I decided what to do.

cd/usr/src/linux
cp arch/i386/defconfig .config
make oldconfig
make dep

It appears that the problems lie entirely in dependencies?? I hope this helps those after me.