Digital Venturis P166 thin clients problems

Gidday all.

I have just received 30 of the above machines for use as thin clients.  They
are intel pentium 166 with 32 Mb ram, and on-board S3 Trio video.  They have
no onboard network card.  So I put in a standard video card (S3 Virge) and
network card (new Realtek 8139 with PXE boot rom) and powered on.

The machine loads the kernel and initrd fine, then proceed to boot the
kernel.  I get down to

...
hid-core.c etc etc
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.26

and there it stops and freezes.  Keyboard LEDs stop toggling at that point,
keyboard doesn't respond and I can no longer scroll up with shift-pageup

I've tried many different realtek NICs, as well as changing the mouse from
serial to ps/2 to none.  Interestingly, the machine has no USB ports.  After
further research I found this error at the very top of the kernel boot data

Failed to free base memory, error 0015-0001-F00FE6E

Can anyone advise me on what else to try?

Google offers only 
http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/2003-July/002322.html which is
similar, but no answers



-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now.
Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with
a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now!
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id56&alloc_id438&op=click