[3c509] RH 7.2 3c509.o (apparently) will not work with 3C509TP

[Bryan Hodgson]

I'm fairly well convinced that the 3c509 driver cannot be persuaded to play
nice with the 3c509TP card under RH 7.2.  On the same machine (e.g.
multi-booting), the card works fine with W98-se and W2K-ws.  I've got 2 of
these cards, one unused, and even swapped in the unused card; no change.
Not a Linux guru, but familiar with most commercial *nices.  Current details
include:

Intel AL440LX motherboard (the one with the Yamaha sound chip), PII.  PCI MB
with two ISA slots (which is where the NIC is installed).

Used 3Com's 3c5x9cfg.exe program to return cards to default configuration
(irq=10,io=0x300).
  The 3c509TP does NOT do PNP (from all info I've found thus far ...).
3c5x9cfg gets only partial success when used to turn off pnp (e.g.
pnpdsabl.bat), and reports that the card doesn't support pnp.
No IRQ conflicts indicated anywhere (e.g. bios, win(x), rh)
Made appropriate modules.conf entries, with and without options specified.
Tried every combination of command line options to insmod that I could think
of ...
No help from modprobe ...
Got no particular enlightenment from running 3c5x9setup -v -v -v ...
Checked out mii-diag, but that didn't get very far.

My recollection is that I had this card functioning under RH6.1 (with some
initial difficulty), but that might be a chimera ... I'm sure I knocked off
that installation > 1 year ago.

It's not clear to me that the problem isn't in the kernel itself, since
/proc/interrupts shows all other interrupts in their correct places, and
nothing for irq 10 ...

For me, I'm about to turn this into a non-problem by the simple expedient of
buying a new NIC already working on another RH machine here; solving this
problem isn't worth further effort to me.  But I thought I'd offer to the
developers/others (great work here, Donald) to run any debug sequences that
might help explore the issue, if it would be helpful.

Bryan