ok, folks, sorry for the noise. I've got it working now. Seems like (I'll figure this out later) haproxy seems to need to start only after the modules have been loaded - and I needed to get the routing setup as well.
thanks!
-jf
--
In the meantime, here is your PSA:
"It's so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help."
-- Andrew Fear, Software Product Manager, NVIDIA Corporation
http://kerneltrap.org/node/7228