Damaged Network Card?

Downloaded the latest version, burned the cd and booted my desktop (nice, very nice!) with no problems.

Used the cd to try to boot my old IBM i1410 Thinkpad. Everything's going OK until a prompt to the effect of "detected PCMIA" comes up & the boot appears to hang. After waiting quite a while with no changes I turned the machine off, removed the cd and attempted to reboot into windows.

Not to be! After many hours (reinstalls, reformats & even repartioning) turns out that the problem was the network card in the pcmia slot which windows 98 would no longer recognize (even though an xp based laptop would) and therefore could not be installed. Replacing the card with a new one (there goes $60) solved the problem.

The sequence of events suggests that somehow Knoppix hammered the card but I can't understand how that might happen.

Any suggestions?