Had a PC with an Asus P4C800E Deluxe m/b. Has an Intel 82547EI Gigabit LAN controller. Had this running perfectly well in my home network; all working through a D55.
Rebuilt a new PC with the same m/b for my bro. Installed all drivers (all in WinXP SP3), updated versions of all. Tested connection with my broadband direct i.e. w/o the D55 and connection good. However, whenever I hook up a network cable from the D55 to the PC, the entire PC freezes. Whether at boot (i.e. with cable attached before power up) . . . where it just hangs at the initial boot screen, or in WinXP (with network icon indicating cable unhooked) . . . . where as soon as the cable is connected, the machine freezes with no functionality at all re: mouse, keyboard . . . only hard reboot and unhooking network cable will resolve. Tried a number of immediate things and can't figure why this isn't working. And I did input the MAC address of the PC into the router software to allow it to connect.
One item that may or may not be important (never used this before so unsure if I even did this right) is when I run network diagnostics/tests, the computer freezes on the final loopback test. Now I run all the tests without any connection to the machine; uncertain if that alone caused the issue with the loopback fault.
Understand there are many layers to this, but as I've used this same m/b in 3 computers with no LAN problems, I can't even begin to think any longer as to what to check out.