After several different compiles with 2.14.19-gentoo-r9 I went back to 2.14.19- gentoo-r7 and compiled and the problem went away. The problem was that when going into runlevel 3 the module couldn't calculate dependencies and caused the boot up to hang. Only way to work was to go in single user mode. After going into single user mode the pcnet32 module was loaded fine and could start network interface by hand with init script. Notice that network traffic acting strange all tcp traffic would initiate one packet out and receive one packet back and then hang. Tried using strace but couldn't derive any more information from it.
did you recompilet he module for pcnet32 against -r9? Is it in the kernel source or is it an external module? Did you run depmod -ae -F /usr/src/linux-2.4.19-gentoo-r9/System.map 2.4.19-gentoo-r9 that can solve issues like this... blah, I doubt this is a bug unless you can give me better info... most likely an issue with init scripts, your mislocation of the module or something of the sort.
It was a fresh install. There were no other kernel sources or modules ever installed. I started with r9 and then after days trying to solve, decided to grab r7 and compile. It has to be a problem with the r9 source.
2.4.20-g-r2 is stable
