this patch is slightly differerent from the last one i posted.

it's still diffed against 2.4.17pre1. one obvious thinko is fixed, and a 
couple lines that looked bad to me have been changed (goto end in 
i810_read seems to be necessary to clean up the wait queue unless I'm 
mistaken), and I'm no longer reproducing any OOPSes.

however, i am seeing artsd segfault occasionally. this also seems to 
happen with the 4Front driver, however, at least if I load 4Front's 
module after unloading this patched driver. I'm not sure if this is a 
bug in artsd or specific to my setup or something nasty i've done to my 
kernel's data structures ;) so maybe somebody else who's still having 
problems with 2.4.17pre1 and KDE can take a look and see how it works 
for them.