I think that I may have posted my e-mail in too much haste. When I look at the last line of dmesg.custom-2.4.26, it looks like my pcnet_cs, some kind of preliminary driver that in turn loads the the 8390 driver for my ethernet card, has an interrupt conflict that I need to diagnose. I am not certain how to do that.
But perhaps the question that I should have asked is where to find documentation on kernel networking options. Somewhere about a year ago, I saw documentation, I think that it was from www.tldp.org and was a networking-HOWTO, that listed kernel options for networking for the 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. But I looked recently for that and was not able to find that howto anymore. Does anyone know where it is now? That is probably what I need the most, because I realize that I have asked a complicated question.