In Julian's [link|http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0302H/vnewsf2.htm|review] of some SMP motherboards, he mentions this:
I had to change a few BIOS settings like the AGP aperture to allow the OS/2 GUI to come up, otherwise it would hang when starting the WPS.
not very explicit, but interesting info non-the-less.

I'm taking back the hardware today - even though fiddling with the AGP aperture might fix the WPS hangs, I still get "unable to operate your disk drive" messages during some boots. And those messages come well before any WPS hang.