Ok, after about a month of procrastinating, I finally got around to troubleshooting my network card. Here's the deal:

1-the first thing that I did was reseating the card, again.

2-no luck with that, so I swapped the card with a neighboring sound card-ok, i've just confused myself, i basically swapped the network card with a sound card and tested both devices

3-my network card is good! but now my sound card is dead, and the answer is: my dern pci slot is fried! nothing works in this thing! Oh man, motherboardsdirect.com is going to hear from me soon.


First of all, my apologies to everyone who already suggested that I tried a different Pci slot. I was naiive enough to think that a new motherboard would not have a bad pci slot after about 3 months of relatively low usage.

And last but not least, I just want to thank everyone again for their input and feedback, you guys are the best.