strange corruption of module config when i try booting with acpi=off

[Joe Desbonnet]

I apologise in advance for this rather ranty email, but I think its
relevant to the dev list because I believe hit on some bug.

I (foolishly) try to get FC4 to power manage my laptop (Thinkpad
T41p). I don't understand how to do "apm -s" with ACPI (can someone
tell me how? -- because I can't find it documented anywhere).

So I boot with "acpi=off" boot option so that I can use the more
intuitive apm system.

On boot system-config-display asks for root password (I've never seen
that before). I hit return a few times because I'm not interested in
reconfiguring my display (especially at boot time?!).

Boot goes bad -- lots of things don't load. In particular pcmcia stuff
-- so I don't have networking any more. Oh oh. Ok, no problem I just
reboot with default options. No good: my system is still hosed.
**Something has reconfigured/corrupted my system setup without my
permission.**

It has something to do with modues. Nothing unusual has changed in
/etc/* at the time of the incident, but all the modules.* files in
/lib/modues/2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 now have no data (just the header
comment line).

Is this a bug, or did I do something incredibly stupid that warranted
my system to be rendered unusable?

Joe.