What I originally thought to be the loader doing bad things turned out
to be a stray, uninitialized pointer being dereferenced with the end
reuslt being the code changed.  Why was this so hard to debug ?  Well,
as it turns out, the code doing this was in the driver init routine
and until I tried setting break points with "boot -d" (CTRL-ALT-ESC
doesn't work until rather late, it seems), I had no idea it was loaded
correctly.  Thus any examination after bootup showed it to be "corrupted".

Darren