This was my very first go at it and I am glad to report that I successfully downloaded FC4, made the ISO images and installed it (everything) on my system. Additionally, I followed the instructions taken from another post to set up my 802.11b rt2500 wireless PCI card. The installation instructions went flawlessly and I got online! Life was good! I immediately began to run up2date. This ran for at least 6 hours and appeared to hang - so I aborted. I rebooted and selected up2date - this time only selecting a few items (kernal, and some misc items like yum - which I hear is a better tool to use but am not sure).
After these updates came down and rebuilt I rebooted the system and noticed that I lost my wireless set up. I tried following the instructions from the post whereby deleting the rt2500 entries from the config and attempting to re-make the various modules. Unfortunately I discovered too late that I did not download the latest kernel-dev to go along with the kernel update I had just downloaded. When I tried 'make install-fedora' needed kernal files were not found. So from where I sit, it looks like I am stuck without a connection to the net and therefore no way to get this going.

Q1: Am I out of luck ? (meaning, do I need to reinstall FC4 and rt2500 drivers because I don't have net access to do any other downloads ?)

Q2: Can anyone point me to instructions for re-establishing my wireless driver and configuration set up after kernal updates are made ? (i.e. is there a quick process for getting the new kernal to recognize previous working set ups or do you have to remove traces of the driver and re-install them each time a kernal update is done ?)

Q3: is yum the 'preferred way to go' or should I stick to using up2date ?

Thanks!

Boot to the old kernel?