I'm giving it one more try. It may have been the hard drive. If it was screwed up it may have been sending all kinds of crap all over the SCSI bus which would explain a lot of the problems. Magically, when I put in the other hard drive, the onboard ethernet started working correctly again. It's downloading at almost 250K/sec right now (Mac OS 9.1 update). I'll run the update, and then the sonnet G3 software, and we'll see how it fares.

Edit: All the CD drives so far have been MATSUSHITA drives, but I have at least one Apple SONY 4x drive I could try if necessary.

If it was the hard drive then I will make a nice video of the hard drive getting what it deserves }