Again, following up on my own post, I believe I mis-wrote earlier when I 
talked about the pccons driver breaking in some way after 1.3.  It occurs
to me that in 1.4, we switchd to using the wscons driver.  Is the wscons
driver used on all installation kernels?  If so, has the wscons driver been
tested with mda adapters?  If not, I bet that's the trouble.  I bet pccons
by itself is fine.  If pccons is what is in the install kernels, then I'll
have to retract this theory, at least, for the moment.
-Brian