Imaging new hardware

My company bought a few new IBM x60 laptops that I need to image. To my
dismay, the network card (Intel 82573L) doesn't seem to be supported
using the standard Zen 7 imaging kernel.

I've added the newest Intel e1000 driver to the modules in the linuxrd
without any luck (the driver wasnt compiled using the same kernel version
as Zen7Imaging). I'm not even sure the Intel 82573L chipset is even
supported in any kernel lower than 2.6.13.

At any rate, I've toyed with the idea of setting up a SuSE workstation
with a compatible kernel, but it seems like it would be a serious waste
of time, considering the fact that the driver update process should be
handled by Novell - not the customer.

Has anyone gotten this chipset to work properly in ANY version of Zen
Imaging? Considering the apparent lack of support in regards to this
issue, what are others doing when they encounter unsupported hardware?