USB and 2.4 kernel

[Steve Cutler <hellama@attbi.com>]

I have a compaq presario 1200z laptop, and in every flavor of linux I
have installed I have always had to turn off USB support. With most
flavors I pass an argument that either turns off hardware probing untill
the system is installed and I can edit files, or it turns off USB
support completly. 

If I boot with bf24 for the install it gets to a certain point and gives
me the following messages and then freezes, and makes me pull the plug
to get it to come back.

	usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
	usb.c: registered new driver hub
	usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.275 $ time 10:29:43 Apr 14 2002
	usb-uhci.c: High bandwidth mode enabled
	usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0x1800, IRQ 5
	usb-uchi.c: Detected 2 ports
	usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
	spurious 8259a interrupt: IRQ 7

Is there any argument that would shut off USB support or hardware
probing? I can install just fine with the 2.2 kernel but I have some
software that wants 2.4, so I would kind of like to get it to work.  

Another thing I have run into when I try to fix this problem with other
distros, is that they want me to configure it in the BIOS, the BIOS on
this machine SUCKS!!!! The only thing I can configure is where I boot
from, and if I have a BIOS password or not. So configuring IRQ's from
the BIOS is out of the question.


Thanks for your time

Steve Cutler