Disable network init on boot?

[Toralf Lund]

I think maybe I knew how to do this once, but I never can remember the 
details of kernel arguments, and the docs/howtos are not of much assistance.

Anyhow, I've installed a new driver for my (wireless) network, and it's 
not working very well - the system will lock up completely in the 
hardware init stage. As it happens, I think I know how to make things 
work, but before I can do that, I need to be able to start up the system 
in single user mode at least. So how exactly do I do that? How do I 
prevent the kernel from loading a certain module that modprobe.conf 
tells it to load? Can I disable a "device type" in the hardware init 
phase? And shouldn't there be as simple way to start up the system with 
the minimal config to allow access to the harddisk? Or is there one?

And so on...

- T