I am running Suse 9.1 Pro, and have updated the kernel to 2.6.5-7.108. When I cd to /usr/src/linux and attempt to run 'make menuconfig', I get this result:

/bin/sh: line 1: lxtemp.c: Permission denied
make[2]: *** [scripts/lxdialog/ncurses] Error 1
make[1]: *** [menuconfig] Error 2
make: *** [menuconfig] Error 2

I have read in many places that I don't need to login as root in order to run this command, but the 'permission denied' message made me try it as root; that was successful.

I then suspected a problem related to lxdialog and/or ncurses, based on the above error message. I found in the documentation a discussion of problems with lxdialog that could be resolved by running 'make mrproper'. I tried that, then ran 'make menuconfig' again, getting this result:

HOSTCC scripts/basic/fixdep
cc1: Permission denied: opening dependency file scripts/basic/.fixdep.d
make[1]: *** [scripts/basic/fixdep] Error 1
make: *** [scripts_basic] Error 2

I can't tell if I'm making progress, or going in circles. Any suggestions?

The issue is that the permissions of the files in your /usr/src/linux-XXXX directory are owned by root. To fix it, as root do
chown USER:GROUP /usr/src/linux-XXX
.
Where USER is the user you want to compile with, GROUP is their group, and /usr/src/linux-XXXX is the actual path to the source. After that, you can do make menuconfig, make bzImage and make modules as a user. You cannot do make moules_install though.