gore: If it ain't broke, then why are you trying to "fix" the kernel?

Seriously though, you could probably just grab a kernel from 10.2 or -current and be fine, since Pat's are so vanilla. You need four packages, as you probably know, and upgrading alsa would probably be a good idea, too.

If you want to roll your own 2.6 kernel, then you actually only need to run make menuconfig, make, and then make modules_install; make bzImage and make modules are only needed for 2.4. Then copy your System map and kernel image.

Something small, but maybe helpful.