I am delighted to say that I plucked up the courage and followed the excellent thread on this forum and successfully compiled my own kernel. However, there are a few things that worked out slightly differently to what I expected.

I am using Slackware 9.1 with kernel 2.4.20 (the one that came with my Slackware 9.0 install) and have down loaded the source for 2.4.24.

My preparation involved following the instructions for the lilo.conf and Makefile and then copying the configuration file from /boot to /usr/src/linux/.config so that I would have a starting point. I used xconfig to go through all of the settings and mainly de-selected items that I knew that I would not need. The first thing that surprised me was that after make bzImage there was a warning that the kernel was too large for a single boot floppy. Bearing in mind that I started with the old .config and then spent time removing items why is this? Is it because I'm compiling for a Pentium II?

I did not change any of the SCSI settings but did notice that my card / chip was not referenced but thought nothing of it as the old kernel worked fine. However, on boot modprobe failed with error 2. Not sure what that is. This is no big deal as I no longer have a SCSI drive and seldom use my SCSI Zip drive. It actually speeds up my boot time quite a bit and I can always use the old kernel when I do need SCSI. Just spent a few minutes comparing the source tree for the two kernel and the SCSI drivers look remarkably similar?

The typical kernel image is too large for booting from a floppy...ignore it. Just compile the kernel for what you need and install it.

Don't know about the SCSI stuff because I don't use it.

Modprobe fails with errno 2 when it cannot find the file specified. In your case this is probably your scsi module. You should be able to ingnore.
However if you want to get rid of it, you would have to have a look to see what is trying to load your scsi modules and remove it by either commenting it out or deleting it.

HTH