Strange behavior with hardware recognition - FC3

[Margaret Doll]

I have a dell Precision 530 in which I exchanged graphics cards from  
a NVIDIA to an ATI RAGE card.  The NVIDIA graphics were not clear.

I did a clean install of Fedora 3, 2.6.9-1.667 on the system.  I  
tried at first to set the graphics to 1024x768

The default boot up was with the smp version of the operating system.

Once the system was booted, it did not recognize the keyboard.  It  
did see the mouse.

I rebooted using the non-smp version of the system.   Once the system  
was booted, it recognized the keyboard, but didn't see the mouse.

I changed the display back to 800x600 and 640x480.   When the system  
rebooted, I had both the keyboard and the mouse functioning.

What was going on?