Quoting Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com:
Also, verify that the motherboard has the latest BIOS (many acpi/apic issues get fixed in bios upgrades).
Thanks all. Just to close this thread, upgrading the BIOS took care of the issues. I can now install from either the 4.4 release - or the 4.0 release and upgrade - without having to pass any kernel options to get things booted. Thanks for the advice.