[eepro100] errors with eepro100 nic

[Runs With Scissors]

I have a Sony Viao FX220 with a built-in NIC that is giving me problems.
The NIC is an eepro100, and it has very erratic behavior when the laptop
is running Linux, but does seem fast and reliable under WinME.
When it fails, it acts just like the Cat5 cable has been pulled in that 
symptoms are that the network is unavailable, though defined.
While logged on a root, I just now had a series of messages that the people
on this list are a lot more likely to understand than I am.
There were several messages that read
	eepro100: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!
which repeated some number of times, then were followed by
	eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050 0c80 at 4720/4748 command 200c0000
and then the NIC seemed to be working again. It seems to me (guessing) that 
this may well be related to the intermittent behavior of this NIC, even though
I've tried a variety of kernels in attempts to fix the problem.
The problems don't seem to change much, despite having tried kernels as 'old'
as 2.4.4 and as new as 2.4.9, all of them installed as RPMs, using kernels 
and RPMs compiled by Emperor Linux and posted on their web site.
Any help on this will sure be appreciated. Thank you.
-BA