Trying several ethernet cards from a wholesale of old/unkown working status some had the same issue, The bios and linux would recognize them but they would not conect.
All in all your card is dead, not sure if theres anything you can fix it but the ones that were dead on my side would often lit up when you plug the cable but the led would not blink, it would be always on, see if yours does the same. It would not blick even when you do network stuff where you'd say it sent some packets or something so it should at least responde.

Network isnt only TCP/IP, you have a bunch of layers before that, the one that seems to be failing is the lower one, the ethernet layer, meaning the card itself cant establish a link over witch to transmit the data, thats why even if you set the ip manually you dont get a response because the card isnt transmiting. Does it actually detect the cable when you plug/unplug it? Some of my cards would also show it was plugged even when no cable was actualy plugged

It appears it was not such a great ethernet card.
Trying to set up Linksys Ether16 LAN Card Non-PNP
- set full duplex
- isa bus clock
- ne2000.com dos config
- gave up

Did you bother to update the TCP/IP stack in 95. The other problem is that it won't work on a gigabit switch or router, since it is 10 mbit, it won't negotiate.
Anyways yea its pretty terrible card, I either do 3com or intel or nothing.

Thanks all for the information. I tested it further by plugging it into my 10/100 switch and the lights didn't come up on it either. Thinking the card may indeed be dead.

I put in an Intel PCI card and that seems to be working without issue.

Thanks again for the advice.

Is your card configured for BNC or TP?

I've got Jumperless NE2000 clone based on Davicom DM9008F and had similar issues - no IP address could be received from Apple Extreme via DHCP. The article gave a hint and helped to figure out the reason of the issue:

But then we get to the real gist of the hate for the NE2000: “Proprietary-OS users didn’t care about those incompatibilities, since they used custom driver preloads in their hard drives as delivered by the OEM, or used custom driver diskettes. Linux/BSD users, by contrast, tended to have a rough time since they tended to (rather naively) assume that an NE2000 clone should routinely work with the standard ne.c + 8390.c driver.”

That actually makes a lot of sense. There were definitely many NE2000 more-or-less compatibles, and many of them used clones of the DP8390 chip rather than the original. And many of those clone chips were different enough that that code written for the DP8390 might break. The first of those clones was probably Western Digital’s WD83C690 and it already introduced several incompatibilities that happened to not matter to WD’s own drivers.

So I had to find the driver exactly for DM9008F, delete "NE2000 Compatible" device from device manager and install vendor driver for DM9008 from the archive. I chose Jumperless variant from inf file. Then, after freeing IRQ for the NIC, DHCP lease worked and winipcfg showed a valid address in my network.

+1

Personally, I also often ended up using the native driver because NE2000 compatibility turned out to be flaky for me.

By the way, that's why I often ended up installing Win98SE back in the day on weak hardware.
I liked the quickiness of Win95, but Win98SE had such a much more complete HCL..