[CentOS] A few questions regarding CentOS (5.0)

Hello list,

I'm a former Trustix User (were active in that community since the very 
first betas), and now that my dear distro is dead, I'm looking to make a 
switch..

Several people recommended CentOS, so I decided to give it a spin..
I installed one new server with 5.0 a few months back, and I do have a 
couple of questions..

- Why does the screen flicker on and off several times during boot and 
when logging in?
- Why does floppy.so get loaded? I have no floppy, and having floppy.so 
loaded while installing certain packages is dreadfully slow.
- When I chose a pure console environment, without any X11 stuff, why 
did a bunch of gnome packages get installed?
- Is it possible to get a php-mssql package? -I need this if I'm going 
to use CentOS at work..

I think that's it for now..

-- 
Cheers,
Morten