In any case, it doesn't even get that far -- the pcmcia system doesn't see any sockets to talk to so it never sees the NIC to initialize it. I tried booting with your suggested options; they didn't help. I still get the no sockets found message.
Does your bios have any settings that would affect PCMCIA like "PCIC
Compatible", or perhaps you have the ability to manually assign IRQ's?
(unlikely in laptops) or even a PnP/no PnP toggle?
Nothing of the sort. It may have a PnP toggle, but none of the others you mentioned. The BIOS has very limited tuning options.
Like I said, I have hardly done anything beyond drop a default install on the machine. It has run practically every version of RedHat since 7.3 or so. It has run a variety of 2.5 and 2.6-bk kernels. My immediate WAG is that this is a kernel issue. There is certainly something different about the way pcmcia is being initialized during bootup.
