Well, I would like to thank everyone for your help so far. Sometimes, despite all the research you can do on your own, there is no substitute for good 'ol experience!
I have bought and tried two different routers, both with the same effect. Both the Link/Act and 100M lights on the dongle of my Netgear FA410tx PCMCIA network card(the same one used by the author of Cnet.device) flash on and off when the router is connected to it, as well as the lights on the router. There appears to be no linking between the two. This does not happen here on our work PC when I hook the router to it...
This is leading me to believe that the 'refurbished' network card I bought from e-bay is probably defective.
Has anyone here had a similar experience? I don't think the lights are supposed to flash off and on like that!
Thanks for bearing with my annoying problems! I'd be more than happy to bake a cake or fix tea for all of you! :-)