Always require second ifdown/ifup after reboot

I have a Linksys card in an old Pentium (HP Pavilion 7275Z), identified
as: 

00:11.0 Ethernet controller: Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX [Linksys EtherFast 10/100] (rev 25)

tulip is compiled into the kernel (Debian unstable/linux 2.4.20).  

Oddly, every time I reboot, I need to ifdown and ifup to get the card to
work. With iface eth0 dhcp, DISCOVER doesn't work until ifdown and ifup;
and with iface eth0 static, it comes up okay, but I can't ping anywhere
until I do ifdown and ifup.  

This problem seems quite similar to one from five years ago:

http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/linux-tulip-bug/1998/09/0007.html

which was never resolved as best I can tell.

There is nothing unusual about my setup otherwise. I've removed all other
cards. I've gotten around it temporarily with this cron job, which is
inelegant to say the least: 

if ( ! fping -q 192.168.0.1 ); then sudo ifdown eth0; sudo ifup eth0; fi

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks--
---
Adam Kessel ([email protected])

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