I was surprised when my trusty Adaptec 2940 just would not work reliably when I updated a WinNT 4 server to Windows 2000 AS; the attached Ricoh CD-RW and Toshiba CDROM would come and go unpredictably. I tried a 2930 I had at hand -- same behavior. I finally went out and grabbed a Tekram (315U) and it works like a charm. Go figure.

I then re-introduced problems by trying to add an HP SCSI scanner; the Tekram doesn't do much to tell you its state when booting and the scanner was behaving oddly. HP OEMs an Advansys SCSI adapter for this scanner; I just happened to have one and I added it. That card has always worked well under Windows and Linux.

Ethernet? Well, I updated all my machines to 3Com 3C905 cards *before* 3Com suddenly abandoned their core product line (leaving a client seriously up the creek) and causing me to swear that I would never trust them or buy any of their products again. My existing cards do work well, though! In future, Netgear, perhaps.