If this is a new installation it would seem to me like you either used the wrong drivers or something went wrong while installing them.

Are you sure you have the latest drivers and how did you install them? Did you perhaps DISABLE the NIC? I have the drivers for the motherboard and installed them "normally". The NIC is enabled, when I unplug the network cable the bubble pops up and says network cable unplugged. COULD there possibly be something missing in the 2k CD?Sounds to me like the drivers aren't properly installed. How many NIC's are present?Just one, in the device manager. The thing tells me the drivers are working properly. So let me get this straight;

You installed a previously known to be working NIC.
You are using a previously known to be working RJ-45 CAT-5 (5E, 6 etc) cable.
You are using drivers that you have previously used as well.

Yes
Yes
and Yes.
Replace the NIC card...they are relatively inexpensive.

Remember to remove the old one and it's drivers and install the new drivers.Here's the deal. I have harddrive 1 in the machine that we use everyday that works perfect. I bought harddrive 2 to replace h/d 1 because it seemed like 1 was going to die. When I set up h/d 2 this is when I ran into the problem. I do not run both h/d's at the same time, I unplug 1 and run 2 to work on it. So I have the same HARDWARE for both h/d's.All the software and the correct drivers have to be installed on both hard drives for it to work properly...check your network settings from drive 1 and ADJUST them accordingly on drive 2

They should all be identical if this is to work.Har29, when you UNINSTALL the network card, do you uninstall the drivers first, shut down the computer, change the network card to another pci slot (I assume) and then start computer and reinstall the network card?

(If you want to skip some part... Let's say physical change of the pci slot: after driver uninstall, restart computer in safe mode and check again in Hardware to not having any reference to your network card).