Is it my imagination?

[openbsd@mail.commercedata.com]

I've had three fun experiences recently while doing some ftp builds of 3.3.

I've been getting further and further into OpenBSD since about 2.6, and 
started converting my servers over to OB starting at about 2.8 as they die 
or need to be put out to pasture.  I built a home NAT machine around April 
29 with the FTP-snapshot version of 3.3 and it worked wonderfully.  I never 
pulled the generic kernel off that machine.

Issue #1:
About two weeks ago (mid-May) I decided to build another NAT/firewall machine 
for a friend's office.  I used my FTP-snapshot boot CD (since it already
pointed to 3.3) and went through the build process quickly on a machine that
had been running 2.8.  Upon reboot the boot loader told me "Inappropriate
file type or format" when it went to load the kernel.

I'm ashamed to say how many hours I spent over the next few days hitting my
head against this problem.  At first I suspected some sort of corrupted
download, given that at the same time I'd discovered numerous problems with
my friend's DSL connection.  After a couple of days of working on his 
connection, I decided it was an incompatibility between 3.3 and the hardware
I was using, so I started using different kinds of machines, some new, some
old.  I then decided it was an LBA problem, and it took me a day of switching 
drive sizes, playing with my partitions and then alternating to SCSI to hit 
my forehead and realize that the boot loader wasn't the problem at all.  I 
finally ftp'd the working kernel from my snapshot 3.3 machine after going 
through a complete build, and voila, that solved the problem.  So to summarize,

A.  FTP builds failed on reboot with "Inappropriate file type or format" when
the boot loader tried to load the stock kernel, on multiple i386 platforms.
B.  Using the older kernel solved the problem instantly.

A couple of friends tried to do FTP builds to check my sanity and they had
the same problem.

This experience would suggest to me that the release 3.3 kernel had problems.
I've noticed since then that the release kernel seems to have an older date
on it than the one I'd used at first, but other than that I haven't seen any
posts or announcements about a corrupt 3.3 kernel.  Did anyone else run into
this?

Issue #2

I have a couple of Intel ISP-1100 servers.  They use Intel Motherboards, of 
course, and in particular the Intel 82443BX PCI Host bridge.  I have never
gotten any OpenBSD build to boot on these machines.  The installation CDs
and floppies lock up as soon as the PCIH driver loads and there's no way
of getting out short of rebooting.  Building the drive on a different machine
does no good.  I tried 3.3 last week, with the same result.  In the archives
I found another guy who had the same problem with 2.8, but nobody wrote him
back.  Anyone else have a clue about this problem?  I saved a dmesg off 
FreeBSD, but I've misplaced it for the time it takes to write this post.  I'll
do another one when I get the chance.

Issue #3
I just got curious and tried to do a 3.3 build on a Sparc LX.  Is it my 
imagination, or is the cd33.iso in the Sparc directory actually the i386 
version?  It *says* i386...

Thanks for any enlightenment!

Dave Klingler