The fix to the onboard AMD Ethernet adapter fails after upgrading to Microsoft Windows 2000 did the trick.
I had to delete the PCNet entry from the registry, reboot and then go into device manager and update the driver. Choosing show list of devices gives you the ability to choose a network adapter. I then pointed it at the directory that I had extracted the amd driver and it prompted me with 4 makes of network cards, allied telesyn, amd,hp or IBM. Selecting the AMD ones complains that it can’t verify the hardware will work with the driver so I then selected the IBM 10/100 Fault Tolerant Network driver and it worked! 10 seconds later I had an ip address and one very relieved heart! Apparently its all to do with the DMI service layer being installed in nt4, being brought over to w2k and then clashing. It has taken me almost 24 hours to solve this problem! Thanks to Davido at IBM for the help on this one.