curious behaviour of pegasus usb ethernet adapter

[tomminator]

Im having major problems getting my network set up. There have been several requests for help with the same, or a related problem, but its still unresolved AFAIK. The adapter works perfectly fine in redhat 7.1. Under gentoo 1.3b (gentoo kernel) however, it seems to randomly work or not. If the adapter is connected during boot, the whole machine locks up. Now, it seems to work if I boot into redhat, unplug it, reboot into gentoo, log on, and then plug it back in... In the redhat kernel, the pegasus driver is a module, and under gentoo, its compiled in (was a module, but I recompiled trzing to fix the problem. On the driver s website, the author mentions a problem with dhcpd (= dhcpcd ??) which Im using to connect to a win2k gateway.
Any ideas that might help to find a workarround (or even a fix) would be verz welcome and are in fact desperately needed...
Thanks for your time,
Tom