eth0 drops periodically - an update

Interesting things I'm seeing.

System is RH7.3 on an AMD500.

A while back I had been running Mandrake 7.2 or 7.3, forgot which. All
was well. I decided to try RH. Now I like RH but the configuration
screens are a bit reduntant and confusing. I didn't have any problems
with eth0 dropping and I used eth1 on my local private net.

So, I had an LNE100TX (Netgear on the chips) as eth0 and a Realtek 8029
as eth1. Now I'm experiencing eth0 dropping about every 10 minutes and I
have to ifdown/ifup it. Last night, I dropped eth1. I decided maybe I
need to update RH. So it ran all night, and this morning my internet
connection was still ok. Interesting. Now I put eth1 back in and the
eth0 cycle begins again. Yes eth0 was the tulip driver, but I tried
various others and no go.

So let's replace eth0 with a Realtek 8139. Starts up ok but it still
drops after 10 minutes. Uses the 8139too driver. eth1 uses the ne2k-pci
driver.

I haven't heard of anyone having any issues like this, so I'm wondering
what the real issues are. Comments, help ??