In brief I had some difficulty getting the correct kernel to load on a dual bootable slackware 32/64 system.

I managed to get both installs working using a combination of this post:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post3686882

(and subsequently post 6 below)

and reference to lilo.conf etc.

I'm just wondering why LILO works this way. The best explanation I can think of is that LILO, when installed writes a physical location of the kernel to the MBR, ie by sector rather than from a FAT or suchlike (I assume this is the case since as far as I can find out LILO doesn't understand filesystems so I can't see hown it would n).

Any thoughts, confirmation or flames?

I would use the method mentioned by hitest in post #8 on that page: one lilo in the MBR, the other in its root partition.

to allow booting without chainloading, under let say slack32 mount the slack64 somewhere, lets say /mnt. Then your lilo.conf under slack32 would look something like this:
that is assuming the slack64 is on the second partition. but as others have mentioned it would be better to chainload.