freebsd forgets root password

[kalin m]

hi all ....

this is really weird.
i've must have set up the root password on this new machine i got at 
least 5 times and after a few reboots this thing forgets it.
i have to go in single user and reset it again and again?!?

what can be the reason?

it'a brand new install of freebsd 7.2  amd64 (amnesiac)  ...  fits the 
name...

while i'm on here... the machine comes with an ethernet card on board 
that according to pciconf there is no driver for it. pciconf identifies 
the card as Marvell Semiconductor (was: Galileo something...) which 
according to the handbook needs the msk driver. which is in the generic 
kernel anyway. the thing is pciconf says none2 at pci0:2:0:0 for that card. 
dmesg doesn't mention anything about msk. and sysinstall doesn't see 
anything either. so far so awesome...

now... the wireless card i put in. ralink technology. in the office here 
there is a simple wifi router that is "protected" with WPA password. if 
i get rid of the password and just use ifconfig to get to the router 
everything works ok but putting the wpa on again and using the 
supplicant things suck. ifconfig says the card is associated. and it 
gets an ip but that's pretty much all that happens. pings to a 
neighboring machine produce huge dropouts. with  85% packet loss. 
another awesomeness...  and those are pings to ips. dns is pretty much 
nowhere to be found. sysisntall has <unknown network interface type> for 
ral0...


so in conclusion:

what's up with the root password amnesia?
what's up with the msk driver card?
and what's up with this wpa supplicant thing?

thanks....