it seems all the trouble I was having with booting my smp kernel on dual athlon mp, wer bios related. I set the bios on the msi k7d master to failsafe defaults and wal la la... it now boots the smp kernel. Next I tried the bios optimized defaults and tried booting the smp kernel, it again booted withiout issue.
I will now go through step by step setting my bios preferences and try to locate the item that was causing the boot failure. More will be posted if the specific item is discovered.
