I obtained Slamd64 10.1 shortly after it was released and while I was generally very pleased with it, I did have a few issues with some stubborn programs that refused to compile or run, so I decided to try a version of original Slackware instead.

Two days ago, I recieved my copy of Slackware 10.2 and had no problems with the installation itself, but when I tried to configure my modem and graphics card a few new problems revealed themselves.

Before installing the modem, I used the cat /proc/pci command as usual to get the port and IRQ, but unlike before, no IRQ was listed in the results for that device ( the IRQ under Slamd64 was 209; memory address however remains 0xa000 for both ). I did manage to use the setserial command ( with auto-irq this time ) and get the modem to be recognised, yet while the "connected at" speeds are the same as before - around 49000 to 52000 - the actual transfer rates of literally anything I download are almost exactly half of what I had earlier; the absolute maximum is 2.8K as opposed to 5.4K. Now, I actually had this problem once before with Slamd64; however, changing the modem from ttyS3 to ttyS4 managed to fix that, while this time I have the modem already on ttyS4 and cannot get it to connect at all with any other setting.

The other main issue besides the 50% connection speed and missing IRQ is that at times, merely scrolling through text, switching between programs, and switching between tabs in Konqueror and Opera is very awkward and unresponsive - the programs visibly lag just to scroll a line of text, and switching pages make the system appear to freeze up for over a second ( not unlike the Pentium Pros I remember using at a local library, but this is not normal behaviour for an AMD 64 4000+ ). In KSysGuard I noticed that the program "X" at the top occasionally used over 40% of the system on its own, and KSysGuard showed itself as running over 20%. The CPU Load is sometimes normal ( near zero ) and other times up to 80% regardless of what I am running, while the amount of memory is reported incorrectly ( it usually says something along the lines of "886,284 KB used, 18,156 KB free", while I have 2 GB of RAM in my system, which was recognised accurately before ).

Has anyone experienced any of the above glitches with Slackware 10.2, or did I just recieve two very strange defective disks?

Aside from the aforementioned 4000+ processor and 2 Gb of memory, the computer has two Nvidia 6800 GT cards and a Multitech MT5634ZPX-PCI hardware modem. With both distros I used the Nvidia 8178 drivers, while I used the sata.s kernel before and the sata.i kernel now.

This can actually be fixed by enabling HighMem support in the kernel, (64bit linux has highmem on automatically) also what kernel are you using?
Slamd64 uses the 2.6.x out of the box, where Slackware still uses 2.4.x.... when I first installed slackware on my dual opteron I could't do much until I did a custom kernel... Also 2.4.x does not have support for PCI-Express (I Think). May be some of the problems your having can be fixed with the newer kernel?.

Thank you, that explains a great deal. I am using 2.4.31, but I am downloading 2.6.15 and will try it in a few hours.

The connection problems persist ( well, now I get about 3.1K instead of 2.8K ) but for some reason, I managed to make the problem with the CPU usage go away entirely just by turning off "plug and play OS" in the BIOS ( and the modem now has an IRQ listed, at least ).