Upgrading a nic driver

Whenever I have a windows 9x/me machine connected to a domain I simply cannot successfully upgrade the nic driver. Any other driver upgrade goes fine. The actual driver upgrade goes well, but afterwards I can't ping or be pinged to / from anywhere except the looback address

I upgraded the driver with the usual setup program (and with the correct driver). Since then I've removed everything from the network control panel, cold booted, and re-installed everything ( CLient for ms networks + domain login, tcp/ip, adapter, file sharing is only needed for serving resources so it's not installed, TCP/IP and MS client are bound correctly). I removed the nic from the device manager, cold booted, and re-installed with a new driver. I also tried the previous driver. I tried installing a new, different brand nic, but it won't communicate either. I tried giving static IP's and dynamic IP's to no avail. I'm trying different PCI slots in the morning which usually solves this, but after that I'm out of ideas

I'd really like to know how to upgrade a windows 9x nic driver when it logs in to a server. The hardware and drivers are good, because this same thing has happened so many times under the same circumstances.

Ok, I disabled all but the new nic and powered down the system overnight. While the nic was disabled, I upgraded to a different driver version and everything is working fine now (at least in a test workgroup). I don't know if the new driver version, upgrading while disabled, or just sitting there fixed things, but I refuse to believe this is long string of bad drivers in the same situation, each time this has happened in the past

I guess the remaining question is there anything special I should be doing to upgrade a windows 9x/me nic driver when the machine is connected to a domain or bindery? I guess I'll be disabling the nic, then upgrading from now, and only when I have lots of time to troubleshoot.