nightly boot.iso installer hangs at step network

[David Timms <dtimms bigpond net au>]

On a HP compaq nx9000 notebook, 512M ram, in text mode, using boot.iso 
(from CD) (2005-01-30 ?) the installer hangs during/after the:
moving (1) to step networkdevicecheck
moving (1) to step network

This is occurring with either the network is set to dhcp or static 
address in the installer. The terminal on Alt-F2 is still responsive: 
top -d 1 shows
STATUS      RSS    PPID   %CPU  %MEM COMMAND
R           844     476    0.9   0.1 top
S          1972     334    0.0  11.3  anaconda

After ten+ minutes, there is no change.