Whenever I boot my Slackware laptop, it freezes at the "cardmgr[72] watching 1 socket" stage. However, if I do a reset and it checks the disk because it was mounted uncleanly, it boots right up just fine. I'd like to avoid having to do this every time. Does anyone have any similar problems?

All of the Linux distros try to discover hardware so that you don't have to do stuff manually. But sometimes things get jammed.

I don't exactly understand what you are saying when you say you do a reset, but if you don't need the pcmcia support you can do a chmod -x /etc/rc.pcmcia.

If that doesn't work, or you need pcmcia for some other reason, look in /var/adm/syslog and see if you find the offending driver and maybe add it to the blacklist in /etc/hotplug/blacklist or maybe consider not running hotplug at all.

I decided not to run hotplug because it caused problems for me and slowed down my init. Now I have a problem with my external soundcard but everything else works a lot better.

By reset I mean reboot.
Yes, I need PCMCIA.
I don't think it's a driver problem, considering it works after an unclean reboot.

I noticed that with the 2.6.17 kernel series, I have to leave my Linksys PCMCIA wireless card uninserted during the boot-up process. Once I have gotten past the point you described above, I can insert the card and all is well. If I forget and insert the card before booting up ... just like you described, hard lock-up requiring a reboot.

Then it sounds like a driver issue and that hotplug needs some tweaking. Look in syslog and maybe you can blacklist the offending module.

I am using 2.4.32 Kernel, so it's not just 2.6.x.

How can I tell what module is causing it to lock up?

Look in syslog (/var/adm/syslog) and you can sometimes see messages as each driver gets loaded. You may be able to narrow it down.