Possible failing Tulip-based card??

All:

I have a LiteOn Ethernet NIC in my Linux box, which has worked
flawlessly for umpteen months. Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a
steady decrease in performance of my cable modem that passes through
this NIC.

After some checking, I started noticing that the card was dropping
packets on the inbound side the order of 50% at its worst during my
testing last night. Although its bettter today, it is still
registering errors in ifconfig; in particular, 232 errors in just over
1 million packets; over 330 frame errors in the same span. I rebooted
the PC and the cable modem to which it is connected, and similar
behavior is being seen. All errors are on the rx side; tx side is
error-free.

Cable tech said he was able to see my modem and it had good signal,
but was also seeing dropped packets to the PC itself...

FWIW, nothing has changed in this setup in some time; machine,
hardware, cable modem, cables, anything. It is an older Linux distro,
and has been stable for ages, so I don't suspect version issues as
nothing new has been introduced...Is this simply indicative of a card
in the early stages of failure, or is there something else I should be
checking??

Thanks,
David

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