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During our testing we've tested some old network cards that use an old firmware. Your network card firmware contains the PXE ROM. There are mutliple versions of PXE, the most common are 2.0 or 2.2.
Many old intel cards use a 0.99 version of PXE that doesn't work very well, so the best way is to upgrade the firmware with Intel's utilities. With that version our PXE version will be updated to 2.20.
Intel call thats kind of update a bootagent update which you can find on the Intel Website [15]
The file to download is called 100pboot.exe for Intel Ethernet Express Pro 100 familly.
I've never found the web page for downloading the 3Com firmware updates, but I've found utilities for 3c90x family on theirs ftp site.
You can find them on this ftp site [16] The file to download is called util430.exe for 3COM 3c90x familly.
Then copy the directory called UPDATE then execute
MBAFLASH.EXE
With the util430.exe version your 3COM card will be updated to the 2.20 version of PXE.
In same cases you have to debug the reason why the pxe request is not handled... The system we've used to trace all the communication during PXE startup is to use a network sniffer ! :-). We've used ethereal [17] (a graphical network sniffer) with the following filter : ether host 00:00:00:00:00:00 replace the 00 by the client MAC. Note:You must run it on the server.
With this tool you can sniff all the transactions between the server and the client. It may help you find a special vendor-tag (that was the case for etherboot-5.0).
You must also try to watch the /var/log/messages in order to read the tftp requests made to your server or the dhcp error messages.