I've managed to find a configuration which seems to be stable. The trick (this is called a strategy I think) was to start with a minimal configuration, see how it works and then add drivers step by step. I started without any IFSs (except JFS), DANIS506 1.85, without floppy, cdrom (and I won't enable both of them even if they work), USB, audio, network, ACPI, APM.
I found that ACPI, APM and audio (at least Uniaud itself) don't make any problems. I rebooted very often and it worked every time. "Power off" works, too. But suspending doesn't - I cannot restart properly or Uniaud causes a crash if - not so important anyway. The battery widgets work fine. I don't know whether the CPU speed adjustment tool by Sungsoo Khim works. It runs but I never saw it actually throttling the CPU.
Ok, then I tried to enable USB again. USB controller drivers (UHCI/EHCI)
were no problem - I have them activated currently, but if I enable USBD.SYS, it suddenly stops to work. I deactivate it, it works again...
It seems to be similar with the eCS installer.
@Sigurd:
Maybe you can verify that. What happens if you disable all USB related stuff in your config.sys and does the other stuff work if it's disabled?
I tried several usbd.sys and all of them failed. Didn't someone recompile the USB stack? I'd like to try it. I heard it wasn't helping very much but if would work poorly, that's better than no USB support at all.
But why always depend on the work of others. I am a C developer myself and I'm familiar with x86 assembly, although I don't have any driver experience. So maybe I should have a look. The trap/lock must have a particular cause. Are the sources available? There are a lot of modified versions around. The problem is that USBD.SYS itself doesn't crash, it crashes later after all BASEDEV/DEVICE drivers have been loaded.
Another problem is sound and multimedia. Uniaud 1.14 RC6 appears to work but I couldn't get MMPM/2 installed, which is necessary- it seems - for most multimedia apps as it includes DART (seems like that at least). It somehow wasn't installed by eCS even though I know exactly that "Multimedia" was activated. If I try to execute MINSTALL in \CID\SERVER\MMECS\BASE, it prompts me to insert the eCS CD... I tried to install it manually (according to my workstation's config.sys) - I thought some drivers would be sufficient to get it to work at a basic level. Of course I know that it also includes WPS classes which need to be registered. Nevertheless, after that procedure it worked partly, at least MINSTALL thought the subsystem was installed and I could try to install MMPM/2 as a multimedia package (there was a control.scr), which didn't work. Does the installer work with audio drivers only? At least it looked like that. Using the "selective install" feature (Warp 4 installation procedure???) to install Multimedia support didn't do much, too regardless whether I have some of the drivers loaded via config.sys or not.
Any idea how to install it? Do I have to fake that there's a eCS CD via ramdisk (USB stick won't work, s.a.) or are there alternative installers? Sound is a must-have.
Regarding LAN support: Rumour has it that there are undocumented switches for the old Genmac driver and the readme says that too (without telling us the switches!!). Does anyone know them? Only the elders could still know them...
Also, I found a Realtek package on Chuck McKinnis' NICPACK page (
http://www.os2warp.be/index2.php?name=nicpak):
http://www.os2warp.be/nicpak/files/realtek.zipIt states to have support for "RTL820x" chipsets, I will try it soon.
Regarding WiFi, I will soon write to the Genmac mailing list and ask for support of that particular chipset.
In the meantime, we just have to stay optimistic.

After all, who spends days installing a poorly supported OS without any enthusiasm?
cheers,
Robin