Thinkpad 760xl i586 cardbus issues

[opopanax]

Okie dokie, here we go.

About 2 weeks ago I was given a really really old laptop. it's an IBM ThinkPad 760XL, model 9547-u9c. My main concern at this point is, I'm having serious issues with the cardbus-->any card I insert is recognized by the kernel, a driver loaded, activity shows on the card, and for all intents and purposes seems to work. however, no worky.

Specifically, I have tried a D-link wired ethernet adapter, 32-bit, which used the 8139too driver, and a netgear FA511 wired ethernet card, which uses a tulip driver.

Symptoms: When card is inserted, dmesg gives "PCI: Enabling device 000:05:00.0 (0000->0003) PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin A of device 0000:05:0.0." the device number changes if I put it in the other slot, of course.

eth0 device is present in the system, but unavailable, and not listed in ifconfig unless explicitly included with ifconfig eth0 or ifconfig -a

net-setup script attempts to acquire dhcp address, but fails, of course..it can't reach the network.
manual config of ip address, bcast, gateway, and all that jazz fails with "SCIOCSIFFLAGS: Device or resouce busy" "SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable"

I've tried every kernel option which i could think of, and which has been recommended to others with similar issues on other forums/mailing archives, etc. The behavior is the same under 2.4 series kernels (debian) and 2.6 kernels (debian and gentoo) I have yet to try a 2.2 kernel, and really would rather not! I've located an ms-dos utility that will change settings in the bios for the machine, but I am limited to changing the physical IRQ's of the various devices on-board. I've disabled everything I'm not presently using, i.e. irda, serial, parallel, etc., and assigned irq's to the cardbusses.

kernel options with which i've played: acpi=on acpi=off noapic nolapic pci=biosirq pcmci=biosirq apm=enable nousb nofirewire nohotplug isa=biosirq (i just made that one up) ad infinitum, in many combinations and with precisely the same results.

What am i missing? shouldn't this work out of the box? it's old, not archaic... my network is fine, i assure you of that. My cables are fine, i've tested them on several machines and devices. the cards, as well, are fine, tested on a couple laptops. I've tested it on two distros and three distinctly different kernels. I've gone to extraordinary measures trying to locate new firmware for the box so I can change the non-existent "pnp OS" setting. I've reached the end of my tether, and balefully plead anyone out there with suggestions to bring them forward.

Respectfully,

Steve