Ah yeah, I eventually ended up with just installing Sarge. The same thing happened with the framebuffer, but I fixed it. Since I knew Knoppix didn't have a problem, I just booted it via Live CD, mouned my sarge partition, and copied the XF86Config-4 file from it's /etc/X11 directory to my own /etc/X11 directory. I know it's kinda like cheating, but it worked out real good, haha. Knoppix was very supportive of me borrowing it's great hardware detection for a minute
Now I just have to fix my sound and I'm on my way to making a reliable desktop environment. I installed sarge as a minimal install and apt-get'ed my way to a fluxbox/X environment. It's veeeery nice!