Driver conflict hoses win2000 ...HELP!!

I brought a win2000 desktop to work and tried to add a network card to it (3com 3c 905-tx) in slot 3 of its ASUS A7v133 MB (AMD tbird with Promise onboard IDE RAID controller). After adding the NIC, during boot a warning message came up saying that the NIC conflicted with the Promise controller and to make sure the NIC supported IRQ sharing before proceeding. I thought it did and rather than be safe and change slots with the NIC, I booted on ... to a black nothingness screen .... BIG mistake. Although I have removed the NIC, now the only way I can get it to boot to other than a black screen is to F8 to safe mode. With safe mode, I still have a black background but I get and can navigate the menus etc.

In device manager however, it will not let me remove the NIC adapters (Direct Parallel, WAN miniport-IP, WAN miniport-L2TP), WAN miniport-PPTP) that are Xed out in red even though the card is no longer in the machine. It says with each it can't ... "the device may be required to boot the computer". It did let me remove the red Xed Mass Storage Controller and after reboot it came back with its usual yellow exclamation (I don't use the controller ...) but it did not improve the situation or let me remove the NIC settings. I can also enable or disable the NIC settings but that doesn't help me remove them or boot normally ...they just change color ...

I tried the Uninstall/unplug wizard and I get the same: can not do ... "this device may be required ...

I tried the troubleshooter and it says to go to the resource tab of the device manager item but there is none ... for this, it says to contact the manufacturer...???

I also tried f8-ing and choosing the "last good config" choice (I have only one choice offered) but that just lands me nowhere ... back at the "black screen of death."

Can anyone tell me how to fix this boot conflict problem?

I'd be happy to get the machine to just work (without the NIC) and take it home again ...

Hopefully I won't have to reload everything because the drive backup isn't current and the CDRW won't work in safe mode ....