Sorry about the vagueness, guys.  I was waaaay too tired to be 
mailing when I wrote that.  The exact problem I'm having is that the 
NE2000 is found during startup (ne1) and listed in the dmesg on 
IRQ 10.  But a little farther down, it gets called ne2, and I get a 
message saying ne2:  where did the card go!?  In the i386 faq, it 
lists a fix for this exact problem.  Unfortunately, I am in the 
installing portion of this whole deal, so I don't exactly know how to 
put together the stuff that is on the install floppies.  I would try 
installing from cd, but this machine is pre-cd boot.  If somebody 
can tell me how to get the install disks set up so that I can use the 
card to download the sources, I can make the custom kernel 
myself.