I am writting this with my laptop, so it came back up clean. I just do not understand the differences in the eth0/eth1 being reversed in the dmesg output from the ifconfig output.
The exact same thing happens on my Latitude C400. Sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it's flipped. In the end, it works as long as I leave it alone.
Should I change the modprobe.conf to have the orinoco_pci aliased to eth0 and the builtin 8139too aliased to eth0?
I wouldn't touch it; I tried messing around with it a bit and it confused redhat-network-config.
-- vh