Networking :: Obtaining DHCP IP Addresses In 2 Distro's ?

A quick rundown of my equipment and plan for this particular machine.

SOYO P4I845PEISA Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Processor
512MB DDR333 RAM
ATI Radeon 8500 128mb AGP Video Card
Using onboard AC'97 Audio and Davicom NIC
Linksys BEFSR81 Wired Router

I am setting up a multiboot system with several OS's, multiple versions of Windows & several Linux distros. The main point of it all is just to have a system where I can load up a given version of Windows or Distro of Linux if I need to test something or show someone how something works.

The Problem:
5 versions of Windows installed, all hardware configured and functioning properly (including NIC) All Windows versions obtain DHCP IP addy with no problems.

Installed Red Hat Linux 9 (first of my linux distros) and it autoconfigured all of my hardware and has no problem getting an IP address.

Installed Fedora 8 and it could not obtain an IP address. I fiddled around with the network settings changing this and that, covered all of the options, and it had no effect. By this time I was irritated, so I just formatted and reinstalled the whole thing, which had no effect and resulted in the same problem. I decided to try it again, this time turning off my sound card and nic for the initial installation. After the initial install, I turned on the sound card and booted up to install it, then restarted, turning on the nic to install it. Fedora installed them both, and managed to get an IP address from my router.

I looked at the ifcfg-eth0 file and the only thing that was different from the previous installs was that a line reading "type=ethernet" (I believe thats what it said) was not there in the working install and had been before.

Puzzling and irritating, but Fedora was now working so I moved to the next distro on my list.

openSUSE 11.0
First install I tried the same thing I did with Fedora (turning off the NIC which did not work like it did in Fedora)
Second install, left all of my hardware enabled, and made it to the part where it asks to verify your internet connection. I clicked Test, and got this error:

Opening of Connection
eth0 device: Davicom Semiconductor, Inc. 21x4x DEC-Tulip Compatible 10/100 Ethernet (rev 40) DHCP Client is already running on eth0

I finished the install, and then got on another machine and I searched the net for this error, but could find nothing that specifically applied to my problem. I played around with the network settings, tried a couple of things that I had come across in my search (changed between tulip and dmfe, checked the box for "Request Broadcast Response", ran "service network restart" in Terminal) none of these had any effect.

The most irritating thing about this is that RHL9 had no problem with this whatsoever and it is badly dated, and the much newer distros are choking on it.