I am Running RHEL4 on a Compaq Presario r4025 that has an integrated Realtek 8139 NIC, and to make things worse I'm new to linux

My Network connection is terribly slow pings to Router are 500+ ms with extreme packet loss. I ran both Fedora 4 and RHEL4 WS in Vmware and the network was fine in that which leads me to beleive it is a hardware/driver issue.

Tried disabling ipv6 - No luck
Attempted compiling new driver - Could not get a ".o" file out of it.

Any Ideas would be greatly appreciated.