I thought I'd ask before looking further into what happened. The symptom 
is this:  I upgrade madwifi from atrpms after the recent kernel upgrade 
in SL4x.  Now, the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network scripts hangs spewing the 
following message (doing this from memory so it may not be exact)

cannot change name ath0 to devXXXX:  File exists

where XXXX is some random number.  Each spew is a different number.  The 
  following are true:

(1) To get init.d/network to complete during bootup, I simply remove 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wifi0.

(2) madwifi works fine if I activate it via 'ifup wifi0'

(3) All my network devices are set to ONBOOT=no (It's my laptop).  The 
message comes from init.d/network which is enabled to activate the lo 
device.  The 'cannot change name' message comes from the

	is_available

function which is found in the 'start' case.  is_available is loaded from

	/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions

Actually, the problem comes from the

	rename_device

function (found in the same functions script) which is called by 
is_available.

I'm not keen to know the whys and wherefores so if anyone has a quick 
solution, I'd be much obliged.  But, if not, some background as to what 
these functions do might help me unravel what's going on and how to fix it.

Ken