i know there are dozens of options, but like i said, when i first installed rh9, and the first thing i ran is "make menuconfig", then the .config file would have my config as my default kernel is as far as i know, and when compiling it again just with that config, things goes wrong.. i haven't made any changes to the config file. this is very strange to me, but i've also got slackware 9.1 and FC2 installed, so i'll give it a go with these distro's