dual PII hang recover methods?

[Jerry O'Keefe]

I have a dual Pentium Intel DK440LX motherboard running RedHat.
Under heavy network load, after many hours, the ethernet driver will
die. I think this is a known problem. The driver is eepro100 version
1.05 and the kernel is a monolithic build of version 2.0.30.
We donot see this problem when the DK440LX has only one Pentium
installed. 

 When the driver dies, we will see either a SMP or a Tx timeout error 
message just before it dies, but the message alone does not
guarantee the driver is down.

What is the best way to detect and recover from this problem?

1. Is there any way to test that the ethernet driver is
working correctly? Maybe some ioctl call?
We tried pinging the driver's port with its IP address, but it still
responds when the driver is known to be down.

2. Should building the driver as a module and when
   the driver dies unload, reload and restart the driver work?

3. Should we try a 2.1 kernel?

Any help is appreciated.

  Jerry O'Keefe