Thanks for the information... I was able to get it working after some more effort. Apparently the 100mbit port was irrelevant.
Not exactly sure what I did to make it work since I tried a lot of things including installing a service pack update for win2k (sp4). One thing I do remember though is that when it finally found the grex with the loader the network was set to DHCP rather than a statically assigned ip. I had no problem after that and was able to flash the grex and now it's registering in Mach so all is good.

Thanks again!