Permanent Ethernet Card Recognition

First of all, I have Debian installed and it was working perfectly fine. At some point the linking between the fonts somehow got corrupted leaving my gnome unable to run. After spending a couple hours going through code and corrupted files (I do not know how they got corrupted) I decided I would just remove gnome and reinstall it. So I did and all was well and good until gnome loaded up again and at the same time, my ethernet card was no longer recognized automatically as it was before.

My network card has the Realtek 8139 chipset. I did

modprobe 8139too

to get it temporarily working, which it did, but my system becomes unstable. It slows down and becomes nearly unusable. Does anyone know how to make this change permanent and hopefully more stable?

To make this easier I went ahead and updated and recompiled the kernel. It now recognizes the card at boot. However, it does not see it as active. How can I make the NIC active at boot? Please someone help me...

Sorry, I can't edit my posts anymore in this thread for some reason. Anyway, I solved my own problem after hours upon hours of going through files and trying different config options. In the /etc/networking/interface file it was trying to initialize lo twice, once at the beginning and once at the end which was apparently making my system believe there was no code in the middle to initialize or simply kept it from working properly.