I tried to use DHCP, but the card didn't get assigned to any IP address. So I used the manual configuration which seemed to work fine during startup. But unfortunately not network connection could be made. So no ICMP ping packets where reaching the destination.
I have had a similar experience. After your interface starts, check to see if dhclient is running. It seems that for some reason, even though I have BOOTPROTO=dhcp in the interface configuration file, it doesn't get an address, but if I run dhclient eth1 it gets an address immediately. I differ in the fact that I am using encryption, and am getting my feet wet with wpa_supplicant .. which could be part of my issue, as encryption would have to be finished setting up before I could use that link to get an address.
Barry