I don't know wtf was wrong, but a few lspci's revealed that whoever's in
charge of enumerating wasn't even seeing the cards at all... To test, I had
him put three more cards in -- a winmodem, a soundcard, and an older
netgear card -- and he placed them like this:
[FA-311] [Winmodumb] [FA-311] [Soundcard] [Empty] [Old Netgear]
and lspci showed this:
<empty slot>
<winmodumb>
<empty slot>
<soundcard>
<empty slot>
<old netgear>
After fiddling with it some more the machine magically started to see the
cards again, at which point everything worked fine. Weird.
TY to all who helped!
--
Stevie-O
Real programmers use cat > /vmlinuz