> My guess was that the cheap head-ends that the ISP's use will
> underflow their tx's and then send an odd number of bits to signal
> that they know something is wrong, but can't do anything about it.  At
> least that is the only reason I can think of why only my *external*
> interface does this.

Some of the M$ drivers might do something similar when they have
started transmitting before the copy to the card is complete [1].
Dribbling on underrun ensures that a valid CRC is never generated.

	David

[1] A horrid trick designed to use as many cpu cycles as humanely
possible in order to improve the results of certain (probably 
Netware) benchmarks.

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk