Further testing on various Px platforms shows that this bug is only
on my hardware which has one of those pesky nVidia chipsets on a
Gigabyte motherboard. AMD 64 K8 with CK804 PCIE. Needs proprietary
nVidia driver enhanced kernel to work.

So apologies for the trouble.

I shall investigate a solution so that others may benefit, as this
was a nice quick system for the budget conscious, although I can now
get a dual core AMD in the latest socket with 200GB SATA drive, 1 GB
RAM for under $1K AUD. Just the thing for running Xen and 200 copies
of Dyne2. Far Out, as us old beatniks used to say.