2.4 Kernel locks at boot

["Andrew M. Lindley" <andlin@ntlworld.com>]

I have installed Woody with current security updates on a AMD Duron 1.3 with
an EagleTEC M825ULR motherboard, 256Mb memory and an IBM 60GB harddrive. The
2.2.20 kernel supplied with the Woody CD set boots fine but 2.4.18 2.4.19 and
2.4.20 all lock up / freeze / halt early in the boot sequence when the
processor has just been detected. The last message is 

ESR value before enabling vector: 00000002

I have to reset to restart the machine. The lspci for the box is:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3116
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:08.0 SCSI storage controller: Future Domain Corp. TMC-18C30 [36C70]
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:11.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UHCI USB (rev 1b)
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Audio
Controller (rev 30)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. Ethernet Controller (rev
70)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc.: Unknown device 8d04

As an aside the VGA controller works with the XFree86 4.2.1 Savage driver.

Kernel freezes are not my strong point where do I go from here.

Thanks in anticipation - Andrew