Safe Mode bootup after installing NIC

Hello tech gurus:

I just reinstalled all the SW in my Win98se PC from scratch and had it
working perfectly. Then I installed a new Belkin NIC in a PCI slot.
Immediately after doing this, I could no longer boot properly. The PC
would only let me boot into Safe Mode. I tried the following, but they
did not work:
Moving the NIC to different PCI slots and rebooting.
Trying another NIC of the same model to ensure it was not defective.
Reinstalling the NIC driver.

When I removed the NIC, once again I was able to boot properly. But I
really need this NIC because I want to start using DSL.
The PC is rather old but, on the other hand, I'm using an old OS, so I
don't think I'm overloading its resources. Here are its specs:
Pentium 200Mhz processor.
256MB of RAM.
40GB Hard Drive.

Please let me know what I can do to resolve this problem. Thank You.
Patrick