Well after the last 2 weeks I find myself much more knowledgeable on linux 
than I ever thought possible. I kept chasing my tail on that stupid 2.4.18 
modprobe problem. Turns out our good friend der hans was correct to keep 
trying to push me down the path of rc.modules being boned. But as usual I 
pushed to deep dark problems with the system instead of looking at the 
obvious.

In case anyone else runs into this. It seems that the 2.2.x series kernels 
stick the modules in the /lib/modules/2.2.x/ dir and 2.4.x sticks the modules 
in /lib/modules/2.4.x/kernel/drivers/. In rc.modules when upgrading from 
2.2.x to 2.4.x you need to change the path that new modules are looked for. 
Der hans pointed me in the direction of looking at rc.modules more closely 
and he was correct in doing so. Thank you for that.

Lynn I didn't mean to ask you a bunch of questions over your cdrom setup then 
bail. I kinda boned my system really good when I tried to upgrade my c 
libraries. This left me pretty much down. The last week has been spent 
patching my system up so I didn't really get a chance to help you further. 
Did you ever fix the problem you were having? Sorry but I kinda forgot the 
details of it and I went ahead and dumped my e-mail rather than saving it 
(directories needed to be cleaned out anyway.)

Now if I can just get opengl running everything will be just peachy

Craig S.