I found out what the problem was.  Turns out my ethernet card on rtk1
needed to be explicitly set to 10baseT for some reason.  Maybe it's because
I'm using a 10mbps hub... :)  I totally forgot about that, but was just looking
at my old /etc.old/ifconfig* files that I was so wisely advised to save before
upgrading.

so anyway, everything looks like it's in order now.  Thanks to everyone
for their assistance.

--sean