I just have the basic 'core' of etch installed right now and am trying to just install xserver-xorg with only the keyboard, mouse and vesa drivers, but I can't seem to get apt-get or aptitude to install xserver-xorg without a whole long list of drivers that I don't need. Hard disk space on this machine is somewhat limited, so I'd like to avoid installing anything that's not really necessary, but am not sure how to go about it. Any suggestions?

Did you try installing just these drivers?

When I try that it still insists that I install the whole shebang along with it.

You can just install xserver-xorg-core ... That won't install any drivers, and I guess you could identify exactly which ones you needed and install them separately. Sounds like a lot of work for a not very significant saving of disk space to me.

I have found that if I know the video driver I want (xserver-xorg-video-intel, say) and I install that first, then all the other, unnecessary video drivers don't get dragged in. If you are using Aptitude in Etch and both apt-get and Aptitude in Lenny or Sid, there may be another issue. The default behavior of those package managers is to treat recommended packages as requirements. To turn off this behavior, you can add these lines to your /etc/apt/apt.conf file (it may be empty now, if you've never messed with it). That could end up saving you a lot of disc space over time.