lockup (?) on autoprobing for ethernet?

[tommck]

When I boot the latest ISO on my Athlon XP machine, it gets to a message about autoprobing for a network card and doesn't continue. It does, however spike the CPU, because my fan kicks into high gear. Is there a way to tell it to ignore the ethernet? I don't need to ssh into it or anything... I'm just trying to test stability (the machine's been crashing hard and I think it might be a temperature issue).

Thanks in advance,

Tom