Kernel panic only after power-on, never after reboot.

[Jon Strait]

I power on my FreeBSD 6.0 Release system every morning and within 20 
minutes, the kernel panics.  Then it reboots and I never see a panic 
again as long as my system stays powered.  It is almost always because 
of a page fault.  From doing a backtrace on the dumps from 30+ seperate 
panics over the last couple of months, the instruction pointer is always 
at a different code location.

So, it's certainly some kind of hardware issue, but the behavior of 
never having a kernel panic happen after a reboot, makes me think that a 
part of the hardware is not getting fully powered up and initialized 
before the kernel begins to load.   Is there a BIOS setting to slow 
things down?  Or maybe a kernel parameter to tweak for greater hardware 
fault tolerance?

I ran memtest86 for a couple of days (the recommended 64 passes) with no 
errors.  I realize that this test could possibly result in a false 
negative, but I don't want to run out and buy a new mobo and RAM if that 
isn't the problem.

My hardware is:
mobo: ABIT KX7-333 with VIA Apollo KT 333 chipset
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+  (1667 Mhz)
Memory: Generic PC2700 - 133 DDR
The video, sound, and NIC cards have already been factored out of the 
problem.

Thanks for any advice.

Jon