I have a Thinkpad 600x (2645-5FU) with CD/DVD drive, 256MB RAM, etc - a pretty normal system. I installed Mandrake 9.2 and Win2K as a dual-boot system, and everything seemed to work fine. I did a number of updates from the Mandrake Club site, leaving me with the 2.4.22-28 as the highest kernel I had installed with 9.2.

When I upgraded to Mandrake 10 Community, I noticed that Kernel Card Services (pcmcia_core) did not detect any slots! Naturally this was a bummer, since my Linksys 10/100 Ethernet card did not come up, and I had no connectivity.

When I start Mandrake 10 with the 2.4.22-28 kernel, I regain my PCMCIA slots, and eveything works again. I have now installed the 2.6.3-secure kernel off of a club URPMI site (club-internet.fr, I think), and now the really odd symptoms began. With this kernel, about 1/3 of the time the PCMCIA slots are detected (on a cold - power down boot), and the rest of the time, no luck.

Any ideas? Being more of a newbie than a kernel hacker, I would be very thankful for detailed instructions to further diagnose this. BTW, dmesg output does not indicate any errors on loading PCMCIA services.

One more item: if i manually modprobe yenta_socket, then the PCMCIA services begin to work normally.

Why would yenta_socket sometimes load and sometimes not load? Where is the init script that controls this?