dhcp proclem using pcmcia nic

Recently got verizon dsl for my home lan, with a vz-supplied
westell 6100 dsl modem. Did initial setup on a w2k partition,
but am now running slackware 10.1 and 11.0 with dhcpcd client
on desktop boxes just fine. No problem there.
Problem is with an old Toshiba 510cdt laptop running
slackware 9.0 with a 3com 3cxe589dc pcmcia nic. That was (and
still is) running fine with static /etc/hosts table. In fact,
I can ping the dsl modem on 192.168.1.1 and point a browser
to it when running static. But, when I try running dhcpcd
instead, all dhcp requests time out, and ifconfig doesn't even
show eth0 after bootup.
Any idea where the problem might be? One configuration
issue that seems weird to me is that both /etc/pcmcia/network
and /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 seem to be running dhcpcd during boot.
That can't be right, I don't suppose. But I tried various
permutations without success (and will post long and boring
details if you feel that'll help). Thanks a lot for any
suggestions.
--
John Forkosh ( mailto: j@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )