freebsd stable - Feb 2005 - rl and acpi problem with 5-stable on laptop

Hello,

I have a rl(4) driven NIC (Realtek 8139) on a Toshiba 2060CDS laptop, and
the card works fine with FreeBSD 5.2.1 (now using 5.2.1-RELEASE-p13).
I'm trying to install 5-STABLE for a while, but the card doesn't work
since version 5.3-RELEASE.
What I get is the well-known "rl0: watchdog timeout" and nothing more.

By the way, the same applies to ACPI. Using 5.2.1, the machine works fine,
but with 5.3-RELEASE and 5-STABLE, I need to boot it without ACPI support.
Booting with ACPI enabled causes the machine to freeze when probing for
devices. (Well, it freezes at random places/stages of the boot process, so
I can't track down what is happening).

The chipset is a RTL8139 (Encore ENP832-TX-PC 10/100base-TX).
This is a ethernet PCMCIA adapter, so I'm not sure where the problem is:
if in the NIC driver, in the cardbus subsystem or in the ACPI subsystem.

I read early posts, and I know rl isn't a good card, but since it
works fine with 5.2.1, I'm wondering what happened since 5.3, including
STABLE, that it doesn't work anymore. The same applies to ACPI.

Any hints to help me to track down the problem (and solve it!) are
welcome.

[]s

T?rgan