Installing redhat 7.0 woes

[That Guy]

So I borrowed this RH7.0 disk from a buddy and installed it. Everything came up fine. I set the IP of the machine to 192.168.50.3 and the gateway to 192.168.50.1 (my d-link firewall router -- kicks ass). I have a Win2k box set to 192.168.50.4 with its DNS set to 127.0.0.1 (don't ask me how, but it works -- I also use RR for my cable provider).
The Linux box was kicking ass until I realized I didn't install any of the development suite (I guess I forgot to check that box in setup). Instead of installing manually, I figured I'd just go back and reinstall since it only took 30 minutes beforehand. Now that I finally got everything I need, the damn thing won't bring up my NIC. All I get when I do it manually is "Delaying eth0 initialization." Nothing points me to believe the NIC is going bad -- I even tested it with the 3COM driver package from a bootable DOS prompt. The card is a 3c509 ISA. I tried to set the IRQ to 3 (as it is programmed on the card) from netcfg.
Any ideas why RH refuses to bring up this card now? I haven't found anything in the dmesg other than the error above.