Kern 2.6.4 - Two Issues

I used the SUSE i586 RPMs on their website to upgrade to 2.6. Afterwards I only found two issues that may cause me to return. If you know the answer or where to look I would appreciate it. After 2.6, my Agere97 winmodem in my Acer T290 laptop quit working. Looking into tuxmobile and smartlink.com for drivers was of little use. The new driver from smartlink is still a beta and will not install properly. I have never been able to use ltmodem (the one on the DVD) to find my modem. ACPI is still questionable - my device seems to run faster - but for each boot cpufreqd fails. manuall installation does not work either. Any thoughts appreciated - :)