Installing Gentoo: kernel panic and other annoyances when trying to bring up network (DHCP)

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Hi. I've been having numerous small problems with Gentoo, and have been 
able to solve most of them except for this: I CAN'T GET MY NETWORK UP!!!

I'm using 1.4rc1 UT LiveCD (basic LiveCD wouldn't boot -- kept getting 
modprobe errors), and here's a rundown of my hardware:

ECS K7S6A mobo (uses SIS 745 chipset)
Athlon XP 1600+
512MB no-name PC1200 RAM (2 x 256)
Realtek 8029 PCI ethernet adapter

It's so annoying! The kernel manages to find my adapter (uses driver 
ne2k-pci), and even gives it an interface, but I just can't bring it up! 
dhcpcd just sits there, manually assigning addresses doesn't work (it 
accepts the addresses, but I can't ping the gateway or anything). I try to 
start/restart the interface using the init script, and it assigns a local 
192.168.etc address...

here's something else weird: If I start the interface, run dhcpcd, get 
angry, hit the keyboard a bit, restart the interface, and run dhcpcd again, 
I get a kernel panic. Here's a screen dump:

Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010 [<80311f60>]    Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010246
eax: ffffffff    ebx: 9f355000    ecx: 9fac70a0    edx: 9f355040
wai: 9fac70a0    edi: 00000002    ebp: 00000000    esp: 9d7dbdd4
ds: 0018    es: 0018    ss: 0018
Process: dhcpcd (pid: 5753, stackpage=9d7db000)
Stack: 9fe20610 9f355040 a0811000 04000001 9febc000 00000006 80312d16 9fe6c000
        9f355000 9fe3ecc0 04000001 00000000 9d7dbe50 8010a611 00000006 9fe6c000
        9d7dbe50 8051f960 00000006 9fe3ecc0 9d7dbe50 8010a80f 00000006 9d7dbe50
Call trace: [<80312d16>] [<8010a611>] [<8010a80f>] [<8010d0e8>] [<80347ca5>]
     [<80348b8b>] [<8014d59a>] [<8014d86c>] [<8014dc4b>] [<803492f9>] 
[<80109083>]
Code: 66 8b 47 06 40 66 89 47 06 66 3b 47 04 74 56 9c 5b fa f0 fe
<0> Kernel panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
  In interrupt handler - not syncing

As you can imagine, this is giving me no end of confusion and frustration. 
If anyone has run across this problem before, or if they have any sort of 
insight as to why either the DHCP non-responsiveness or the kernel panic 
could be happening, I'd probably be so happy I'd buy you a new car.

TIA!
Paul d'Aoust

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