Motherboard: ECS RS480-M - Great MB but Mepis problems

Motherboard ECS RS480-M presents several problems...
(This new Motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 is an amazing value. It would be a shame for Mepis to not be fully compatible).

1. Ethernet broken - Mepis loads chipset driver 8139too but it fails to work. Also, I had the same problem with a new PCI Ethernet card that has RealTek chipset RTL8139D.

2. I have two PCI Modems that work with Mepis on other Motherboards; however, on this MB they don't work properly: Query Modem displays blank/empty fields.

3. Mepis (all versions) fail to detect onboard SATA RAID. So, I installed an additional IDE HD to dual boot Mepis.

4. The new Mepis SOHO Server Test01 version hangs while attempting to detect SATA and will Not boot.

5. When shutting down Mepis 3.3.1-1, sometimes the system hangs. Holding the power button will appear to shut the system off, but it will not boot properly again until I Unplug the power cable for a few seconds.

Any assistance is appreciated,
-pc