91c111 ethernet hangs

[Altera_Forum]

I seem to have a problem with the ethernet driver hanging during board boot up and initialization. I've got a Stratix II interfacing to an SMSC 91c111 ethernet chip in what is similar to a VESA standard interface. My board interface is similar to that of the Stratix II DSP board, if anyone has familiarity with that. 

 It seems as though during board initialization, if I have an ethernet cable hooked up to the ethernet port, (ie. I am connected to a network), the board boots up fine.  When there is no ethernet cable hooked up, the ethernet driver initialization sequence gets stuck and hangs.  Has anyone seen this before?  I'm running a Nios II processor, Stratix II FPGA, and some other stuff. I've built everything in Quartus 6.0 SP1, and the SOPC builder.

[Altera_Forum]

It can occur either because of DHCP or because of Auto-negotiation process. 

It is possible to try to remove DHCP in IP stack settings. In old versions (6.0 or early) it was necessary to correct a code of phy initialization of 91c111. During Auto-negotiation at not connected cable it came to the end on timeout and the critical error was caused.