RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument

[shady kazan]

i've been struggling with this for quite a few days,
The problem i'm having is that i cannot get networking on my RHEL4 box.
I have only one nic AMD 79c970 [PCnet32 lance] which was working quite
good in fact .The last major change we done to our net configuration
was setting up a dhcp server for we were running on static IPs but
this machine kept its static IP and it was working after that change
until the other day when it suddenly stopped.
trying ifconfig eth0 up seems to work fine, but looking under tha hood,
ifup eth0 says:
ip_tables: (C) 200-2002 Netfilter core team
RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument
RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument

the following is my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

# Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE]
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=175.35.16.182
NETMASK=255.255.254.0
GATEWAY=175.35.16.1
HWADDR=00:0c:29:43:6b:72
NETWORK=175.35.16.0
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes

and my routing table
[root at RHEL4AS_APP ~]# route -n
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
175.35.16.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.254.0   U      0       0        0 eth0
169.254.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0      U      0       0        0 eth0
0.0.0.0           175.35.16.1   0.0.0.0             UG    0       0
    0 eth0

i also checked and i think the module is loaded in the kernel and the
IRQ port is properly configured
[root at RHEL4AS_APP ~]# grep pcnet32 /etc/modprobe.conf
alias eth0 pcnet32
options pcnet32 irq=10
[root at RHEL4AS_APP ~]# lsmod | grep pcnet32
pcnet32                30153                0
mii                       5185                  1                pcnet32
[root at RHEL4AS_APP ~]# grep eth0 /proc/interrupts
10:                 59                 XT-PIC                 eth0

hope someone can help me figure out what happened!
regards,