i am currently running debian sid with the 2.2.20 kernel and am having probs getting my sound to work....i haven't tinkered with it too much but i have a copy kernel 2.6 and figured i might as well go ahead and upgrade. will this fix my problems with sound and is the xwindow option a ok choice for installing a new kernel??

What kind of sound card? You do know 2.6.x kernel is in beta still, hasn't been released as totally stable at this time.
The latest stable kernel is 2.4.22 at this time.

A new kernel will only work if it has the support for your sound card, but I'm sure you can actually download drivers just for your card if that's the case, but we need more information.

well, i have crystal sound fusion in the box i am working on, it worked fine when redhat was installed, so i know it's something i can fix (if i knew exactly how) the box is a few years old so i also know 2.2 and 2.4 both support it. when i run sndconfig i get this error:

You don't seem to be running a kernel with modular sound
enabled. (soundcore.o was not found in the module search path).
To use sndconfig, you must be running a kernel with modular
sound, such as the kernel images shipped with Debian Linux or
a 2.2 or greater kernel.

i installed debian 3.0r1 so again i know theres just something in there i need to set