intermittently disappearing NIC

[invictus1997]

i have a cnet pro200 10/100 network card on an athlon 850 abit kt7a moborunning win98se, yamaha sound card, 512 mb ram creative internal modem, inno3d geforce2mx200 vid card. My NIC it shares irq with my sound card (irq10) and windows does not report any conflicts or anything like that. but when i boot first time in the morning something like "update escd succesful" comes out and then the NIC disappears from the device manager. after several reboots though (i assume when the machine has warmed up), "updating escd" msg again appears on bootup and lo ang behold my NIC is there and everything seems to work fine. it still shares irq with my sound card and windows device mnager does not report any conflicts. what gives?

[Jim9999]

Sounds like a screwy net card driver.

Can you change the card for something like a 3Com (or similar) and see if demonstrates similar behavior

[invictus1997]

i dont think i can exchange my nic with another brand but lately, the darned thing gets more consistently recognized by windows during bootup. i'll observe it for a little while and if it still malfunctions, then i'll buy another card. by the way, what other brands can you recommend.