networking not working

[unixjingleman]

Hi
My OpenBSD install went fine. My network cards were detected as xl0 and xl1.
On the first boot i did:

#ifconfig -a

to see if my interfaces had acquired I.Ps. yes they had. then i did:

#ping 192.168.2.234

this is the gateway. The response i got reported 100% packet loss. This was the same for both interfaces. The ethernet cards are old 3com cards which i thought would work with OpenBSD for sure. One of the cards came straight from a machine that ran Linux and it worked in that.
So i did a sniff with tcpdump and the OpenBSD box wasn't getting replies from arp requests that it had issued in an attempt to find it's own MAC address so it could ping the gateway. The arp cache on this OpenBSD box is emtpy and it doesn't respond to the gateway's arp requests addressed to it. I'm using the default install(generic kernel)
Any ideas?