Okay, so I just recompiled and installed 2.6.7 kernel.

Got DHCP working ... sort of. My computer resolves to the correct IP. I can ping other IP address, ssh to a host completely off the network if I use the specific IP.

However, I cannot resolve www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, etc. In other words, my net works fine if I have the actualy IP... but nothing else.

What would cause this problem? How do I fix it?

Make sure that your ISPs DNS servers are listed in /etc/resolv.conf - ie:
nameserver ip.of.isps.dns1
nameserver ip.of.isps.dns2

I had been under the impression that DNS information was supplied by the DHCP server. The problem is that this is on a notebook, and as such I am on 3 or 4 different networks at any given point on my average day ... which would likely resolve to different DNS... and I've never had to do this before on any system with DHCP enabled ... how is it handled on the other automatically? (such as Slackware)

Have a look in /etc/sysconfig/network/ which on my system has default files called config, dhcp, routes and wireless as well as the interface specific ifcfg-lo, ifcfg-eth0, ifcfg-eth1, ifcfg-wlan0 etc

If you look at the dhcp file there are a lot of options in there that are used if your system uses dhcpcd. They can be overridden in ifcfg-ethxx if you require specific different dhcp behaviour per card.

It may be on your system everything is in your ifcfg-eth0 file.

The bits in my various files that do the magic are:

STARTMODE='onboot'
BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF='yes'
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE='yes'
MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF_DYNAMICALLY="yes"
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE="yes"
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF="yes"

This gets dhcp to create a temporary resolv.conf (it saves the original and restores it on exit) with the info from the dhcp server. You can look at this to see what nameserver info it's put in.

If in doubt about what configuration files take precedence you can always put everything in ifcfg-ethxx once it's working correctly.

Good luck.