> Do you have an ideas as to what I can do or what I
> am misunderstanding?

Here are a few suggestions:

Now, I don't have any ne cards myself, but from looking at the driver,
it looks like the ne driver doesn't have half/full duplex or media
selection for all of the supported cards; it may be because the
underlying cards don't support full duplex or it may be because we
don't know how to control the device.

Is this an ISA or PCI card?

Could you send us the output of "ifconfig -m ne0" (or ne1, or whatever the
device is?), as well as output from dmesg showing how the card was
detected at boot time?  

for instance, my laptop reports that it supports:

fxp0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        media: Ethernet autoselect (none)
        status: no carrier
        supported Ethernet media:
                media autoselect
                media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
                media 100baseTX
                media 10baseT mediaopt full-duplex
                media 10baseT
                media 100baseTX mediaopt loopback

If you don't see any lines with "mediaopt full-duplex", then the
driver doesn't support setting full-duplex on your board.

If you can find appropriate programming documentation for the board
from the manufacturer of either the board or the chips on the board,
someone can probably whack the driver into line, but getting the docs
can be difficult..

> My problem is that transmission rates across this interface are
> literally half what NT can do so I strongly suspected an
> inappropirately configured device. 

What exactly are you measuring, how are you measuring it, and what
numbers are you seeing?

What's the network topology over which you're doing the measurement?
One hop over ethernet, or something longer?

Have you looked at socket buffer/tcp window sizes and whether Path MTU
discovery is in use?  NT turns on PMTU discovery by default whereas
it's off by default on NetBSD.

sysctl -w net.inet.ip.mtudisc=1

ftp is potentially problematic for measuring network performance
because it also does filesystem I/O; if you want pure networking
benchmark numbers, you can take a look at the "ttcp" program which you
can find in pkgsrc/net/ttcp.  

						- Bill