Tested this on two different machines. The onboard intel pro/100 ve adapter on the intel 815 boards isn't functioning at all, the device appears, you can set an ip on it, but it will not send packets. Somebody else want to verify this?
I also have an onboard intel pro/100 ve. It was unsupported in 2.4.17, but that was fixed for 2.4.18 (see www.int21.de/eepro100). Do you still have this problem? Can you mail me your lspci-output? In 2.4.19, there is also the alternative e100-driver you could try.
can er test gentoo-sources-2.4.19-r9 and get a status update, thanks.