network woes with laptop and pc card ethernet

[Jeff Vian]

I am having problems with networking on my laptop.

FC2 on a Dell Inspiron 5000 with PC card ethernet.
I have 2 different ethernet cards and the symptoms are the same with
both.
3C562B/3C563B dual network/modem card
3C589D 10base2/10baseT card.

On both the choice of network media depends on the dongle attached
(10baseT or 10base2)

I had no problems with the network interface when running redhat 9.

With FC2 it sees the device and loads the 3c589_cs module (I do not
remember which module was used with RH9) and properly configures it.  I
am able to start the network.  It links to my switch as 10Mbit full
duplex as indicated on the switch leds.

Here is the weird part.
Sometimes (intermittently) I am able to get out to other machines and
other times I cannot.  When I do successfully connect it usually after
some period just stops communicating.

I thought possibly it was an issue with speed/duplexing so I tried
mii-tool to see what the parameters of the adapter were, but it tells me
there are no mii interfaces available. In fact the error message with
mii-tool is 
"SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth0' failed: Operation not supported
no MII interfaces found"

"route -n" properly shows me the routing, both network and default. 

>From the laptop, ping to the adapter address works, ping to the default
gateway does not.
>From the other devices on my network everything works except pings to
the laptop address.

I am certain it is a "failure to communicate" between the pc card and
the switch, but I am at a loss on how to proceed.  

My options seem to be: 
1. get this (these) adapter(s) to work reliably (preferred) or 
2. get a new adapter.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to identify/fix the problem since
mii-tool will not work for me?

TIA
Jeff