My experience has been that 3Com makes a dandy 'munitions
grade' nic.  Easy to find, widely supported, very reliable -
particularly the Etherlink III series.  My firewall has a
3C595 that came with the box and a 3C509, FWIW.  I really
like the 'Intel Pro100B' for stuff that matters.

A quick web search sez the RealTek 8029 chipset is very much
like the Ne2000.  If you've got 'em just sitting there
looking at you I'd use them.

P.S. I wouldn't be too quick to criticize any hardware just
'cause it appears to make Win9x crash and burn.  You might
want to boot into 'safe mode' and delete references to
network hardware from the registry then plug'n'pray again. 
If/when it refuses to acknowlege hardware, take a look under
'unknown devices' too... (Gawd, how I loath MS engineers -
"Locating driver for Unknown Hardware.")

Steve

Mark Berkwitt wrote:
> 
> 
>  I have 2 PCs and would like to set up a network at home.
> 
>  I have a 3com etherlink (ISA) I've been using for a while and 2 other
>  PCI NICs, sitting unused, based on the
>  RealTek 8029 chipset.  Currently, the 3com is used with my cable-modem.
>  I tried installing either of the 8029 NICs and upon booting made my
>  win98 partition unstable.  Each time I would boot I would get about as
>  far as the login window and soon after the machine would reboot.  I
> took
>  them out and then had to search for new hardware in w98 to get my 3com
>  nic to work again.  I suppose if I'm determined to create this network
>  I'd better buy 2 new nics that won't fight eachother.
>  Any you would recommend???
> 
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-- 
Carpe cerevisiae