the joy of Mac OS X PCI Ethernet cards

I tried on and off to get a PCI Ethernet card to work under Mac OS 10.2, since my Mac's built-in Ethernet interface is only 10Mb/s.

Macally: the 10/100 card and driver work under light load but wedge under real load (VNC, in this case).
D-link: the DFE530TX+ card and driver are similar, but can be made to work haltingly by configuring the interface down for 1 ms. and up for 2 s. in a loop. Not optimal.
Asante: I now have the Asante 696 and it claims to use a nice NS 83815 Ethernet chip instead of the usual low-end Realtek 8139 that the other Mac Ethernet cards use. Strangely, the drivers on the CD that came with the Asante card seem to be newer than the ones on their web site. But the 696 using the drivers on the CD just works! What a relief!
Macsense: I have the Macsense card but haven't needed to try it yet.

Given that 10.3 is now out, some of these vendors seem rather sluggish: some of them are still proud that they've got 10.1 drivers! It appears that all these cards but the Asante use the wretched Realtek 8139 Ethernet chip and use drivers derived from a common source, since they chatter away like mad magpies in syslog (at kernel.err severity, no less!) and they seem to be undebugged.