Description of problem:

When trying to boot into a text or rescue modes on an Acer 230 Travelmate
laptop (Intel i845 video) everything is fine until "running /sbin/loader"
(or something pretty close) shows up on a screen.  At this moment
screen goes into a funk state blinking all the time and making it
hard to read.  It appears that an image wraps-up over a top, cursor
is loosing its position, text shows up in wrong places and it is
a blinking gray on a black instead of white on black.  Even typing
"in blind" is not much help as most of results ends up below a screen
edge.

A graphic screen is also not that great (nasty distorted fonts and jagged
lines all over the place) but somewhat usable unless one needs to
visit a text console which is then mostly covered by a blue-gray blob
and really has nothing to offer.

No amount of specifying vga modes and/or screen resolutions seems to
help.  All of that is just ignored the moment we are hitting '/sbin/loader',
even if a parameter had some effect on a screen look up to this moment,
and things go haywire.

OTOH when booting a CD from RH 7.3 distribution nothing of that sort
happens.  Text consoles remain "normal" and usable.  I have to give
'nopcmcia' to boot or otherwise the whole process is stuck on PCMCIA
cards detection but one past that everything is fine.