Two identical systems are experiencing the same problem - once past P.O.S.T., it
takes just under 2 min to boot in to Win98.  It's definetly the NIC - if I
disable the NIC in Device Mgr or physically remove it, the boot in is normal.
If the NIC is in - it takes an extraordinarily long time to get in to Windows.

The NICs are Realtek RTL8029 PCI 10/100.
The symptoms are the same whether the ethernet cable is connected or not.
I did try - on just one of the systoms - removing the RTL8029 and installing a
3COM PCI NIC.  The symptoms were identical - no change.
Tried forcing the NIC to take a different IRQ - a number of iterations yielded
no improvement.
Have tried rebuilding the network stack (removing all protocols, service,
clients, etc. and re-installing all of them).
Still - same symptoms.



Note:
I had removed the IPX Protocol which the user(s) did not need.  In doing so, I
was, of course, prompted for the Win98 CD.  The users could only find their
Win98SE CDs - the OS on the system I was working on was Win98 (first edition).
So, I used the Win98SE CD when prompted during the course of making the
networking configuration changes. Could this be an issue?

Thinking that "something" was still "wanting" IPX, I put IPX back on (using the
Win98SE CD).  Same symptoms.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am indeed stumped.  I'd be very greatful for your feed
back.


--
Chris Rivenbark
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