Second NIC Not Detected on Boot

OS: SuSE 9.1 with kernel 2.6.5-7.111 WE have two identical systems built using the ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard with an Athlon 2500+ processor. The bulit in NIC is detected fine but the following errors appear in the boot.msg log concerning the second NIC: SIOCGIFFLAGS: No such device interface eth1 does not exist However, if I go into YaST => Network Devices => Network Card, both NICs appear in the top window as detected but not configured. (We are using both as part of a bridging firewall based on Shorewall, hence do not set them up in YaST.) At this point I can abort out of YaST and manually execute the /etc/init.d/bridge script and both NICs are found. Question: What does YaST use to detect NICs? Thank you, Lucky Leavell