I am running Slack 10.2 (probably closer to current). My Mobo is an ASUS K8N-E. The nic reports as (according to dmesg)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK8S USB Controller (rev a1)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK8S USB Controller (rev a1)

the forcedeth driver loads (again, according to dmesg)
forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.30.
eth0: forcedeth.c: subsystem: 01043:80a7 bound to 00:05.0

but at the end, dmesg reports:
eth0: no link during initialization.

Once, booted, it comes up (seems I have to wait a few seconds though, as when I enter the command immediately after login (as root) it just hangs) if I manually run the script /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1

Since I can get it working, it is not a huge problem, and I suppose I could try to add the line to (re) run the rc.inet1 script into the rc.local, but I would much prefer figuring the "real" fix for this problem.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Are you manually loading the forcedeth module in rc.module or is hotplug loading it? you could try adding

/sbin/modprobe forcedeth

to rc.modules to make sure that the nic is ready when rc.inet1 starts

No, I am not manually loading it. Strange enough just now when I got home and turned my machine on I did not have to manually run my rc.inet1 script for the link to come up. To be on the safe side though, I will go on ahead and put it in the rc.modules to see if that makes a (reliable) difference and let you know.

Thanks for the reply.