Just heard from Pascal, Seems that FreeBSD has the same issue with the board. Pascal's w/around is to disable USB 2.0 in the BIOS.
I saw this errata but couldn't imagine that it was related to my problems. Apparently Linux works fine on this h/w. Not sure how USB2.0 turned on in the BIOS could cause the PCI bus(s) to go undetected. And further, how having a USB flash key plugged in also somehow works around the problem .. --Andrew
