I used to do OS/2 support as an IBM co-op back when I was in college. In many ways it was pretty sweet -- I did some cool stuff with the built in Rexx interpreter, which -- though not as or widely supported as, say, perl -- was still pretty nice.
Regarding your specific problem, I'd add that IBM's support structure was byzantine, with multiple groups with different agendas and tons of snafus like: "this isn't our issue, contact Thinkpad support," followed by "this isn't a Thinkpad issue, contact OS/2 support." (Aside: I once tried to get a different IBM group to handle an issue I believed to be theirs, and after getting rebuffed multiple times, I wrote a rather angry response which got me in trouble with my manager. Learned a lot from that -- mostly, don't write angry.)
9 times out of ten, the issues we received boiled down to a) missing / out of date drivers for some piece of hardware (as in the S3 chipset you mention), or b) incompatibilities/errors running existing windows apps. I think OS/2 failed for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, even though it was better than windows (for a while), people just didn't feel a strong need for pre-emptive multi-tasking, so it was never a strong selling point, especially if it meant you couldn't run the latest PC games.
Regarding your specific problem, I'd add that IBM's support structure was byzantine, with multiple groups with different agendas and tons of snafus like: "this isn't our issue, contact Thinkpad support," followed by "this isn't a Thinkpad issue, contact OS/2 support." (Aside: I once tried to get a different IBM group to handle an issue I believed to be theirs, and after getting rebuffed multiple times, I wrote a rather angry response which got me in trouble with my manager. Learned a lot from that -- mostly, don't write angry.)
9 times out of ten, the issues we received boiled down to a) missing / out of date drivers for some piece of hardware (as in the S3 chipset you mention), or b) incompatibilities/errors running existing windows apps. I think OS/2 failed for a variety of reasons, but ultimately, even though it was better than windows (for a while), people just didn't feel a strong need for pre-emptive multi-tasking, so it was never a strong selling point, especially if it meant you couldn't run the latest PC games.