did you ftp/http install?

Yes, I installed using ftp (without problems once I had found the drivers disk).

We (Red Hat) should really fix this before next release

This looks like Bug# 25774.

There are certainly similarities with bug 25774. I do have an ISA card (I am not
sure of the make), but in my case PnP is turned off (due to other OSs on the
same machine), and it has a fixed io setting which I entered during install
(io=0x300). Also I used dhcp throughout (atlhough the IP address is actually
static). The modules.conf file had only two lines after install "options ne
io=0x300" and "alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc".

Brock do we have any ne2000 like cards to test.

This sounds like a kernel issue.

I have one of these cards, and it works fine here with 'linux expert' install
and a driver disk with an FTP installation.

I think the thing here is that you always used to have to install in expert mode
to get the card detected (the driver used to be on the main disk).  So I just
did that, knowing that I wanted my network card to work.

Respectfully, I would disagree that this is a kernel issue, although I think it
may be related.  Look at what we know:

1) Adding the missing "alias eth0 ne" line fixes the problem;

2) The Expert install with driver disk works properly;

3) A non-PnP card has the same issue;

4) A normal install produces a half-written /etc/modules.conf -- the options
line is there, but the alias line is not, even on a card that was explicitly
configured.

My SWAG would be that the installer isn't writing the modules.conf file properly
in this case, with the cause of that behavior being unknown.  It would make more
sense to me if nothing was written to the /etc/modules.conf, but the interface
was configured during installation.

This goes for the following cards using both a text install as well as 
graphical install.

realtek 8139

Manually updating /etc/modules.conf is the fix

If I understand correctly, in a non-expert install you are prompted to select
the NIC type because kudzu cannot detect it. You enter the proper type, the
install works, and then on reboot the modules.conf is incorrect so networking fails.

If you do a expert install, specify the card, yada yada, then reboot, it works fine?

I had a blank partition just big enough for a minimal install, so I have been
doing some testing. In my tests even an expert install dosen't necessarily add
the "alias eth0 ne" line, which was the case when I didn't try to add any extra
drivers when given the option. If I did try to add extra drivers from the
drivers disk, the ne1000/2000 compatible option wasn't listed, but when I
pressed the back button, it had auto-detected the card, and after the install
the "alias eth0 ne" had been added. It is almost as if it needed to be reminded
what drivers it knew about. Incidentally, I don't know if it is relevant, but my
PC only has 32Mb memory.

With the expert install there is an extra screen: the 'Do you want to add extra
device drivers' one, with 'NE2000' already there.  I think that's the
difference.

The problem is that for ftp/http/hd installs, the install forgets about drivers
it loads at the beginning (saves real space on the disk), so it also forgets to
write those items to /etc/modules.conf (for the same reason it doesn't write
things like nfs.o and sunrpc.o out; ne.o and 8390.o look the same to it then; it
doesn't even know ne.o is a networking module in fact).

It doesn't affect pci cards because kudzu puts things back for us using the same
probing code, but it does affect cards that aren't probed. This is a pretty big fix.

I found a nice fix for this.