r8169 driver - no net connection and hang at shutdown

Hi,

I'm having some trouble with r8169 and Linux kernel 2.6.15.1 getting my 
Realtek 8169 ethernet controller to work. This is the gigabit 
ethernet-capable embedded version which is integrated into a Foxconn 
925A01-8EKRS2 motherboard.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post, so I apologise if this 
is more appropriate to linux-kernel.

Whenever the system boots, the r8169 driver does not pick up the MAC
address for the card; it reports the MAC addrress as being
FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF. (I have also tried various 2.6.12, 2.6.13, 2.6.14
kernels with the same experience). My first thought was "broken chip", 
but this box has similar issues with other network cards which I'll 
mention later.

When I run ifconfig, this reports:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
              inet addr:192.168.0.9  Bcast:192.168.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
              UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
              RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:4294967290 overruns:0 frame:0
              TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
              collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
              RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
              Interrupt:21 Base address:0x4800

The IP address has been assigned statically in /etc/network/interfaces
as I don't use DHCP (and I doubt DHCP would currently work anyway). If I