This has been yet another red herring. After trying out the kernel
option three times with two different kernels, it failed yet again
with the same symptoms.
I have attached /proc/interrupts for 2.6.35-rc4, once with pci=nomsi
and once without, but again, I do not think this makes a difference :-/
It was some german forum, a guy with completely different HW, but the
same symptom. I thought trying out the option wouldn't hurt.
Maybe it came for example from http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/20/3
originally.
Stephan