Hardware is a Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad z61m. Core2Duo (9540-HAG) The network interface is a broadcomm device. When booting with no parameters, the boot process locks up after the kernel is loaded (Before any display after the ....'s in the load, have finished, 'Ready.' is flashed up & the screen goes blank). If acpi=off is specified, then the kernel will boot, but the tg3 network interface does not work. TX packets & RC packets are not incremented. (It looks like no IRQ's are processed, as /proc/interrupts shows a count of 0).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 156548 ***
Dupe.