When scanning for network devices during boot, the pc freezes while scanning for eth16i : nothing to do except a "hard" reboot :( Configuration : Athlon XP 2000+ Motherboard : ASUS A7N8X (nvidia nforce 2) with nvidia LAN integrated Ethernet card (RTL8139 chip) GeForce 2MX tv card everything works well when booting with the "nonet" option.
one more detail : the image that I used was gentoo-grp-athlon-xp-1.4_rc2.iso
known bug with nforce2 should be fixed in future releases.
db fix