>I can not believe there is no 100% reliable way to read the MAC address from a netcard because WinIPCFG on Win9x machines will do it right every time. The equivalent utility on NT/2K does it reliably as well.

Mark,

Then why don't you use winipcfg?

WinIpcfg /Batch c:\temp\output.txt

(I haven't tried this with an NT machine but there must be something similar!)