System slows to REAL slug on boot

[<kaynjay@igalaxy.net>]

I'm having problems with my system on rebooting to a new kernel.  I don't know 
what is causing the problem, and have found nothing yet in the archives about 
similar circumstances. The new kernel is 2.2.9, the old was 2.0.36.

Once on reboot the system halted while starting lpd.  Another time on gpm,
which seemed to respond to a ^X.  All times, though, things ground down to a
grossly sluggish pace once reaching the login prompt.  I have to shut the system off 
after login attempts, where each letter takes 5-10 seconds to appear, and login 
never completes.  CAD gives no response either. The system once "died" at the
xdm login window, and no key combinations gave any response.

All affected files in /etc (recursively) have been changed to reflect tr0 instead 
of eth0 for my olicom PCI card.  

ISC's dhclient was recompiled with all proper changes made to the kernel config,
and compiled under the 2.2.9 kernel without a working network connection.

The kernel was recompiled with the tr card support not modularized, as it was 
not recognized otherwise (is there a way to force a module to be loaded 
immediately???  I can't tell if /etc/modules is supposed to work with 2.2.).

The dhclient does attach properly AFAIK based on its messages.  Other
services appear to start normally except for complaints early on about some
modules not being present.  I think these are 2.0.36 modules.  

The 2.2.9 kernel worked without networking.  At that time the tr support
didn't exist due to the modularized nature of the driver, which is written
for that kernel version.

The new kernel was compiled using make-kpkg.  

Are there incompatibilities between slink and potato which need to be
managed?  Especially with respect to networking or other daemons, which I
may encounter on this upgrade?  Is this sluggishness possibly due to the
dhcp client, which is said to not work with the 2.2 kernels (though it seems
to, here)??

Anyone else see this kind of behavior??  Any thoughts??  Would it help if I
got a list of the file names in /etc/init.d to list services in place?

Thanks!

Kenward