Christopher,
The wording of my email came out wrong. I did not intend to cast aspersions on CentOS.
I wrote to the CentOS and/or cAos mailing lists some months ago on this topic, and I also put up an FAQ on the problem (which you can find in the FAQ's under Installation). In my mind, my message yesterday was in the context of my prior emails and the FAQ.
Back then, I went through hours of trial and error tests, and I found exactly the same problem with exactly the same hardware when I was running Fedora 1 (and perhaps Debian as well -- on Debian, I am not sure, but I am 100% sure about Fedora). So I concluded then that this is not a CentOS or cAos problem, but at least a RedHat problem and maybe a Linux problem.
I believe my prior email answers your question in detail.