John
Well your idea did work and I was able to get through the total installation. There were some other issues that I will worry about later but once I was in gnome I tried to enable eth0 all the lights on the cable modem were blinking and it completely locked up the laptop.
No need to reinstall you can either boot into single user mode at the grub prompt or use rescue mode on the media (cd or dvd). Single user mode shouldn't try to bring up networking.
Somehow you've got to determine the chipset or whatnot of that ether device and do some web searching.
Might want to disable that card for now in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (set ONBOOT=no)
Then to test it later you can open a terminal and run "/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up" and watch the laptop hang...arrgh.
Another option is to leave that device disabled and use a supported pcmcia card if you have one and a slot. then possibly a software update (like with "yum update") will fix it at some point.
Sorry, but it sounds like it's an ugly problem from the get go. I've been able to work around things like this in the past by searching for the problem in google and passing flags to the kernel in the /etc/grub.conf ... hope this helps.
--- John
