card reports no resources: redux

A month ago a had a problem with "card reports no resources" on a compaq 
with an eepro100 NIC, immediately after installing an external SCSI tape 
drive.  Following advice found and offered on this list, I did
echo "100 500 200">/proc/sys/vm/bdflush
and also added a line to /etc/sysctl.conf
vm/bdflush = 100 500 200
This seemed to fix the problem at the time.  However, I had to power this 
system down over the weekend, due to a planned power outage, and when I 
restarted, I was getting the same "card reports no resources" error 
messages in /var/log/messages, and the NIC card seemed to be disabled, 
because the machine was not responding over the network.  I checked the 
settings in /proc/sys/vm/bdflush, and they were correct.  These events 
seemed to be associated with the cpu going into sleep mode-- although apmd 
is not running, the kernel still seems to be exerting some power management.
The system exhibited this problem over the course of about 8 hours, and 
then stopped and is now running fine with no logged error messages and 
apparently no failures of the NIC card.  I haven't changed anything in the 
system, other than logging on locally to wake it up.  Since logging on (and 
logging off) locally, it's been running fine.
Any ideas about what this problem is or how to change the system 
configuration to avoid it in the future?

Thanks for your help as always.

John Ketchum