When I setup redhat 6.1 on a system at work, I setup my eth0 "realtek" to use dhcp. Upon rebooting, I noticed it locked up, so I shut the system down and removed the card. Upon booting again, I noticed that the system was using the pump program to pull the dhcp. Well, at work were using a windows98 system to deliver internet (laugh). Through the internet connectivity sharing that ms uses, it sends out a very weak dhcp signal, or possibly modified version of dhcp. So, no matter what I tryed, weather bootp, dhcp, or entered the network information manually, it still locked up. How I worked around this: I restarted, removed the ethernet card and the configuration, I then did an rpm -e pump to remove it from the system. I then installed dhcpcd from the cd. After that, I rebooted and reinstalled the ethernet card. My system seen the card on boot, but delayed the startup cause pump was not installed, after logging in as root, I started dhcpcd and used the command "ifconfig" and noticed I was on the network. I tryed to ping a remote host on the internet, and was able to ping without no problem. I just thought, that maybe you should setup a way to use pump or dhcpcd during the ethernet card setup.
Apologies for the unresponsiveness of the previous pump packager... This old problem report should be solved in either 7.1 (which would have a newer pump), or rawhide, which contains dhcpcd as a replacement for pump.