LAN access fails after 5 seconds

["Raymond L. Zarling" <rayz@toto.csustan.edu>]

I have just installed Debian 2.2.12 on my Pentium 150 and have spent an
entire day trying to get my LAN card working for longer than 5 seconds.

It is a Kingston KNE100TX, using a DS21143 chip manufactured by Intel. 
Several documents say the tulip driver should work although Greg Siekas
mentions on his web site
(http://www.bmen.tulane.edu/~siekas/linux-tulip-information/tulip.html)
that some versions of tulip have had problems with the -43.

My symptoms:  The NIC activity light blinks constantly, as though there was
a lot of traffic.  This appears to be bogus, since when I shutdown it
continues to blink; I can even reboot without it losing a beat.  (Turning
off the power does reset it!)  I believe my software configuration is OK,
since dmesg shows nothing suspicious and--get this!--if I "ifconfig down"
and then "ifconfig up" again the manic blinking stops for about 5 seconds. 
In fact, by recalling and entering a "ping" command immediately after
coming back up, I see I have a successful connection!  The pings start
timing out when the manic blinking starts again.

I should mention the exact same hardware works fine under Windoze 98.  Under
Linux, "ifconfig" shows the card using the same irq and memory as it did
under Windoze.

I got the source code for the 4/14/99 version of tulip from Greg's page.  It
compiles fine, but I can't install it because it was "compiled for kernel
2.0.36" and I'm using 2.2.12.  I can't figure out where the 2.0.36 comes
from; the only linux kernel headers I can "find" (and therefore these must
be the ones gcc uses?  how is this configured?) are in
/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.2.12/include/linux where UTS_RELEASE is correctly
defined as 2.2.12.

So...
Can anyone give me a hint on how to compile tulip to run under 2.2.12?
Or any hints on what else to look for that could cause this strange problem?

Thanks

--Ray Zarling
rayz@toto.csustan.edu