I personally have had very few problems with this driver. It has been working perfectly for me for quite some time.
If you have any problems with the driver on a 1.2.x kernel, please update to Linux 2.0. The current version, as of this writing, is 2.0.33. There have been many improvements to the token ring driver since the 1.2 patches and most of them have not been ported back.
Also, you will not have to patch a Linux 2.0 kernel for token ring. The source is already included. However, there are some test patches of the code going into 2.1 available if you would like to use it.