(Brian, I don't know if this will help, but here a related experience ... it's a long note with various error messages to help others find the reference if it is applicable to them."
Jan 2001
SOLUTION TO A SPECIFIC PCMCIA NETWORK CARD INSTALL PROBLEM.
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Symptoms: No auto-detection of the PCMCIA network card. I did a manual re-install of the network card (using control panel "add new hardware" icon or "network" icon add; FWIW the network card was a DE-660 D-Link Ethernet card). The manual reinstall seemed to run through the process okay (once I learned to point to C:\windows\options\cabs when it couldn't find things like 'net.cat' and 'nettrans.cat' and asked me to insert the WIN98 CDROM that did not come with my IBM thinkpad), BUT when using Access Manager to attempt a dial-up the error message was "failed to load tap" and "tap needed flag not on for driver". I then noted there was a yellow exclamation mark on the network card adapter in device manager (control panel / system) and double-clicking on it gave the message something like 'NISD.VXD and NKERNEL.VXD were unable to install the driver'. On some re-installs I got the error message "rundll32 caused a general protection fault in module SETUPX.DLL". When my computer went into sleep mode later (it was getting tired too) and then re-awakened I also had an error message "windows is not able to identify or use the inserted PC card device. You must make a memory area available to communicate with the device. ... Check your computer's config.sys file for a memory manager that is excluding upper memory regions between A000 and FFFF". Needless to say there was nothing relevant in config.sys. I also ran a diagnostic that came with the DE-660 card which seemed to indicate that the network card itself was defective (but see the solution).
SOLUTION: (per Daniel at IBM support) Bootup in safe-mode (F8) and look at device manager where duplicate 'ghost' installs will be visible. Where there should have been only two PCMCIA devices installed, there were four (and a red cross through a 'PCMCIA card service'(..?) device). These had not been visible in device manager under normal mode for boot-up. I simply removed all the PCMCIA devices under device manager as well as the network card adapter device, and on re-boot into normal mode the PCMCIA slots were automatically detected and re-installed and on the second re-boot the network cards were automatically detected (finally!) and installed properly and everything worked out okay !!! I forwarded a note of appreciation to the management people at IBM's Montreal Mobile Support Group for the non-standard troubleshooting insight that Daniel provided (I had spoken with many others at IBM and at other related support groups including the network card provider and on-line internet searches ... hope someone finds this note and it helps them too).
Background: PCMCIA network card had been working okay. In device manager I temporarily "disabled" both the network card and the PCMCIA slots to see if the networking was the reason for boot-up delays. I then tried to re-enable the network card (should have re-enabled the PCMCIA slots first I guess) and got a rundll32 error message. I think I then tried to enable the PCMCIA slots but wasn't able to get the network card working (I forget some of the steps here) and eventually decided to select 'remove' in device manager for both the network card and the PCMCIA slots, to re-install them, but then got an "invalid VxD dynamic link call in ZVSWITCH(01)" error message that also said "your windows configuration is invalid". Even though the PCMCIA slots re-installed automatically on boot-up, I could not get the network card to re-install despite repeated uninstalls and re-installs. Various symptoms as noted above. Final solution as noted above.
Dan
