Intel GB NIC failing to recognize on boot RHEL 4

[interp01 at sevenbelow.com]

I am attempting to install RHEL 4 on an IBM T60p laptop and I am getting
the following NIC failure error when booting or running ifup:

e1000 device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

I have found several articles on the net that mention the lack of the
e1000 driver not being aliased in my modprobe.conf file.  I have already
added an entry as follows to modprobe.conf and manually loaded the module
using modprobe (neither way made a difference the module seems to load
perfectly fine):

alias eth1 e1000

An lsmod shows the e1000 module loaded:

e1000                  96429  0


I have confirmed that the network card does have an entry in the hwconf
file.  I have tried setting the driver parameter to e1000 but a reboot or
run of KUDZU will cause the driver parameter to be reset to unknown. 
Could this be the cause of my problem????

Here is my hwconf entry for the NIC pre boot or KUDZU run:

-
class: NETWORK
bus: PCI
detached: 0
device: eth1
driver: e1000
desc: "Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller"
vendorId: 8086
deviceId: 109a
subVendorId: 17aa
subDeviceId: 2001
pciType: 1
pcidom:    0
pcibus:  2
pcidev:  0
pcifn:  0
-

Also, I am seeing green lights on both the Laptop NIC and the Switch, and
the network cable has been tested on other machines and is working :)

Im really at an end here so any insight from anyone would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,

DK


As and FYI here is my ifcfg-eth1 file:

IPV6INIT=no
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
GATEWAY=192.168.1.2
TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=none
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
IPADDR=192.168.1.10