Why does the mac number change after each boot up

[boray]

I am using open suse 10.3 (64 bit) os. When I type ifconfig I get a hwadress
BUT this hwadress changes after I reboot the machine. And this hwadresses are different the one I see in XP on the same machine(I have XP and OpenSuse on the same machine) ? What is the reason for that?

[boray]

I have found the problem of changing mac adress after each boot up. Forcedeth driver in linux can not see the correct mac number and gives an eror then it assigns a random mac number. I have found out that this adress is given in reverse order in nvidia cards and because of this reason driver wont see it correctly. There are some fixes to the driver forcedeth but I could not apply these fixes. Can some body please tell me How can I make the driver read mac adress in the reverse order? Can I find the already fixed driver somwhere on the net?

[Kumado]

I had notice on my Acer 7520 laptop that the interface number is always changing. It is eth56 at the moment. I had not looked at the mac address and forcedeth is on my system as well.

Suse 10.3 64 bit. I am not familiar with forcedeth. I am going to start checking the mac addy now though.

kumado