[RESOLVED] slow boot nic win98se

Having just rebuilt my machine with the latest MB, CPU, and memory, adding a board at a time, I have become aware of how much my NIC card contribute boot up time. It is a PCI card, and I have tried two different brands with identical results. From the digging I have done around the web it appears likely the NIC is searching for something DHCP (it takes almost 60 seconds and nothing else is happening, i.e. no hard drive access). I only use the NIC for my DSL access. My question is, what are my options and their pros and cons? USB NIC? Would finding a NIC with only 32 bit drivers help that much? What else? I reboot a lot because I am constantly testing applications, but in the course of that am also constantly researching on the web so I can't just disable the NIC for a while and do good flow work. (If I were organized enough to write down my questions for the web and research them later that would be different.)

I know that if it's a 3com nic by default the boot rom is enabled, if it is a 3com you can download a utility for most nics to disable the boot rom and speed up your boot process by quite a bit.