I had a problem something like this... (Score 1)

I am running a legacy EtherExpress Pro 10+ card on a PCI machine, and for some reason the IRQ and I/O port settings I choose using the DOS utilities don't carry over when I boot into Linux. I can set the IRQ to, say, 10 using the DOS utility, but if I try to tell eepro.o to use those settings it won't work. However, when I just let eepro.o probe for the card, it sets it up on IRQ 7 for some reason and works fine. Have you tried that yet? Taking all the hard-coded irq and i/o port stuff out? Other than that, I would take all the advice listed above (ping the loopback, ping its own address, etc.) And one other thing -- did you check the cabling? In my experience a surprising number of network problems end up being that.

On a side note, why is the EtherExpress Pro driver disabled in the kernel 2.2.0pre4 make xconfig? The code's all there, but for whatever reason I had to go in and edit the .config file by hand to make it compile in eepro.c. Or am I missing something here?