A friends problem with 9.2, smp on ABIT

I have a fellow lug member with a serious performance problem with Suse 9.2. He has a multiprocessor ABIT motherboard with the VIA chipset which performs slower than it did under 8.2. The system is fully updated and the kernel has been updated twice. He has also twice reinstalled and still has indications of 64 bit support when his hardware is 32 bit. Has anyone solved this problem? On my single processor SOYO motherboard system 9.2 works fine. Is there some issue with the smp kernel? -- _______ _______ _______ __ / ____\ \ / / ____|_ _\ \ / / | | \ \ /\ / / (___ | | \ \ / / | | \ \/ \/ / \___ \ | | \ \/ / | |____ \ /\ / ____) |_| |_ \ / \_____| \/ \/ |_____/|_____| \/