Jumping into this thread a little late, I'm using
a Novell ne2100 card with the le driver with very good results.  this card
has worked well for 6 years and I have no complaints.  I can get about
400kbytes/sec of through put on my 486 DX2/66.  I'm using it with 
samba, nfs, you name it, it works great.  These cards have DMA capability,
and they use jumpers for their configuration.  The numbers I'm relaying are
from ftp -- programs like ttcp and netout give higher output numbers.
-Brian