I faced this problem installing Gentoo on my new Acer Aspire 1410T laptop with an Attansic NIC. I have compiled the atl1c.ko from gentoo-sources-2.6.31-r6 with config copied from the Install CD and CONFIG_ATL1C enabled. The driver was working well during all installation process.
This has been added to the autobuild kconfig and will be available in next week's CDs.