Well, it worked, almost perfectly.. I still haven't been able to get my USB mouse to work, but I've futzed it for the moment with a USB-to-PS2 adapter and it's working fne that way.. I'll figure out what exactly I need to enable or disable for it later.. but the sound is up and working once more, and as witnessed by this post, my network card's working again.. turns out it was a Realtek card.. and now that I have Net access again under the new kernel, I can actualy keep hunting for reason why the mouse seems to be dead on USB mode. Many thanks for the .config, that seems to have helped immensely. Now I gotta try out all the other stuff (my usual applications, the CD-RW, a couple games..) to make sure everything is working fine with the new kernel.. and maybe it's my imagination, but the dekstop seems a tad more responsive with 2.6.0-test9.. maybe it's that 'preemptible kernel' stuff. Thanks again!