OK. Long story...

My computer came fitted with a WinModem, the Intel-v92-Ham.

Normally unusable under linux, but fortunately some nice people at Intel made some drivers for it, which SuSE packaged with their distro and I installed

The driver consists of two kernel modules, hamcore.o and ham.o. both must be loaded for the modem to work. The device file is /dev/ham

When I start WVDial (or any other dialer) to connect to the net, there is a long pause and plenty of CPU/Hard disc activity. Then WVDial says 'cannot use /dev/ham, device not recognised'. In the error log, I have 'insmod: install block-major-hamcore failed'

However, when I (as root) I say:

#modprobe hamcore
#modprobe ham

WVDial works fine, there is no pause before the modem starts up and all is nice.

There is a script with the driver, called hamboot. This is supposed to load the two modules at boot time, but it doesn't

Now, although I can cope with loading the modules by hand every time I connect, I really want to do it automatically or at boot time. Any ideas?

Sure, you could place them into your modules.conf file in /etc/modules.conf

Or, if that doesn't work, you could put it in the boot script:
/etc/rc.d

modprobe hamcore
modprobe ham

Just reading the man page here about insmod actually sounds like maybe the command you are looking for. It sounds like it "installs" the modules rather than just probing them?

That's good, I didn't realize that I could just sit the commands at the bottom of the script and they would execute. I somehow presumed boot scripts to be much more complex.

I have tried insmod, but don't understand what it does. It seems to have exactly the same effect as modprobe. The modules unload again after reboot.

so you know, that script you have that came with the drivers might need to be setup in the /etc/init.d directory, with the proper symlinks from /etc/rc.d/rc3.d in order to work (but I dunno for sure - I haven't used this stuff).

PS - I think modprobe actually does call insmod. It's kind of a wrapper that loads dependent modules in additon to the one you specify as an argument to modprobe on the command line.