SuSE 9.2 on Abit AV8---VIA velocity ethernet broken!

Hi, I did a bit of surfing and apparently there are serious problems with the via_velocity driver in kernels earlier than 2.6.9. I just finished an otherwise uneventful installation but the online update fails due to lack of internet connectivity. Actually, there is a *little* connectivity (e.g., right after rebooting I can dowload a few *bytes* before traffic stops, apparently due to ARP packet flooding which even knocked down my 10/100 switch!) but for all intents and purposes the connection is dead. It is almost certainly a driver issue and I was wondering if there is any known fix. As I said I cannot do an online update so upgrading the kernel is not exactly simple... Thanks, E. Duenez