USB / Iopener Question

[Jon]

Hi,

I finally was able to get cable in my apartment (by cable I mean analog
internet over 75 ohm coax -- I hate the term broadband), so I set my
hacked I-Opener up out in the kitchen.  

It currently has Redhat 7.2 with a home-brew 2.4.17 kernel and a linksys
USB nic.  

The kernel picks up the nic in the dmesg, but it doesn't assign the nic to
eth0 or start the networking services.  If I try to restart the network
services after it has booted ifconfig complains that there is no such
thing as eth0.  

Once the computer has fully booted, if I unplug the nic and plug it back
in  again, the network comes up and everything works like a champ.  

Anyone have a guess as to why this is happening? 

Jon