After a week of googling around and being baffled... Uwe Herman from planet debian finally steered me in the right direction:

after checking the Linux-Kernel bugzilla and finding bug 6471, now I know this is a known bug and that maybe it has been fixed in kernel 2.6.17.11

Ok, I seem to have isolated (one) trouble.

The problem seems to be my ethernet controller, a Marvell Yukon 88E8055 PCI Ethernet controller.

a "search in google" (google is getting pissed off that people start using 'googling' as a verb) turned up some interesting results, none on an Alienware Aurora, but some about Fujitsu Lifebooks:

Please don't laugh at my feeble attempts to install Debian, I'm computer literate but not a guru...

I recieved my shiny brand new Alienware Aurora m7700 last monday, ever since then I've been trying to install Debian, after that failing, anything debian based, and as a last resort... gentoo...

Anything to save me from the stupidity of windows...

mind you, having to use windows at work and at home for the past week has really made me realize why I don't like it all over again... I'll get back to the 'mild annoyance' that is windows in a later post. This one I'll describe my Debian install blues...

Gparted!

What a beauty! it does everything you need it to do! (partition wise), an excelent tool, comes in a tiny CD image, you burn it, restart your machine and it helps you create partitions while in a Gnome environment... the only thing I would change about this beauty, is to add a web browser... because sometimes you just want to check how much space you'll need...