Just for info, with certain PCMCIA controllers the install will fail to detect the PCMCIA capabilities of the laptop if the machine was warm booted after using windows. This is a known problem with the pcmcia package that seems to have been worked around in pcmcia-3.0.6. In the meantime, some note somewhere saying that if pcmcia isn't detected, the user should try to power off the laptop and boot it directly under linux would help. I know several people who have been bitten by this, and lost many hours on that problem, myself included.
Added missing summary
We will need to get a laptop that has windows on it to be able to confirm this problem.
It is likely that you won't be able to reproduce the bug because it only happens with a one (maybe more?) PCMCIA controller. The laptop I had a problem with had the following controller: O2Micro OZ6836 CardBus at mem 0x68000000, 2 sockets