> strangely enough, i tried almost exactly the same thing at random last
> night.  when booting the machine, try
> 
> 	(1) boot into "protected mode command prompt"

Yes, as soon as himem.sys (or whatever) is loaded, most kernels won't be
able to initialize (probably the MMU is left in an unexpected state).

Dosboot itself works just fine (using XMS memory to load the kernel).
At some time kernels without APM worked, but that might have changed.

Martin