Invisible nic and other horrible problems.

[MasterRa]

Alright - this is gonna be a tough one, i'm sure - and i'd appreciate any help or ideas anyone can give.

Here's the deal:

I've had Gentoo installed for around 6 months or maybe more, and everything has been going pretty good for the most part. All my network stuff was working perfectly.. i've got two nic's, and am using the system as a router box (among other things).

Around 2 months ago, my system got hit by lightning.. or well, lightning (probly not directly, but i heard audible arcs when it happend) hit a network cable that was touching some metal on a sliding class door (don't ask..) and fried the the ethernet port on one of my nics, as well as the port on my cable modem. I'm sure it was just the ports - the modem still worked via USB (in windows), and the nic still recogizes and even tries to power up - it just doesn't get any actual data transfered.
So i looked around and found some drivers for another NIC i had (but hadn't figured out what drivers to use for it - i had found the other card's drivers first, and didn't need 3 nics at this point), and it seemed to be working fine.

However, that's not the case:
If i turn on any type of bandwidth shaper (cbqinit, the "Wonder Shaper", etc), i instantly lose that connection.

No real clue why. The only thing that looks wrong at all, is in /var/log/messages, i get a "eth2: transmit timed out, resetting.." line, a few times, and then the connection is gone alltogether.

I suspect there is a problem with either this card (an "Elements" card, using the fealnx driver), becuase a friend with a totally different system setup, kernel version, and distro (he's running Debian) is having the exact same problem, and the only link is that he is using the same nic.

So last night i swapped my nics to see if that was indeed the problem (i figured i'd put the one currently servering my internal network onto the internet and see if it had the same problems..), but i ran into some trouble.

The dead network card is still in the system (not causing any problems so far as i know), because if i take it out, the other cards don't work (i have no idea why this is.) I even tried compiling the kernel without the driver for that card, but leaving the card in, and that doesn't work either - one of the other nic's doesn't work in that case.

So the real problem is that the one good working nic doesn't seem to show up.

It's eth1, but a 'dmesg | grep eth1' gives no output (both eth0 AND eth2 are listed, however.)

Here is a clip form my desmg: