i followed the sticky thread for the compile guide to do this. i think where i went wrong is i didn't know what make mrproper did until after i typed it in and it cleared my .config file away. since i was just recompiling my 2.6.17 to fit my needs more and have it not load a ton of modules i don't need.
some of the things i changed were the type of cpu i have (amd athlon 64) framebuffer scrollback.. and went through all the menu loading everything i have on my system only. the other thing i added was support for 8x8 console font.
did make, make modules_install then make install.
i realized that once i did that my systemmap and vmlinuz files in my boot folder were updated but it also created a bzImage file as well.
so i copied the bzImage file over and edited lilo to beable to boot to it.

• i really don't know which one i am suppose to use.

when i boot to bzImage, i have no usb support. so my keyboard/mouse don't work which renders me helpless.
when i boot to vmlinuz, the console font changed to what i had asked it too (which is way too small but i needed to see for my self) so i figured that it only took effect on the vmlinuz file... not sure why..
well one of the things i loaded that time was radeon support for my video card. when i tried to load my ATI drivers it failed. i search why, found out that it was because of the radeon driver. so knowing where i messed up last time i backed up my .config file, did make mrproper. copied my .config back over, ran xconfig removed that setting. repeated the other steps... tried ati driver again, didn't work. so i went back into xconfig to make sure it wasn't even loading and that i only had vesa, and i did. i also decided to make the font change back from 8x8 to 8x16. repeated the steps again, (keept in mind since i noticed that everytime i did make install i saw that it was updating the system map and vmlinuz file in /boot i never copied over the bzimage file) however this time i got errors on make install. since i have a windows boot second in my lilo config it was erroring on it's partition. i did a fdisk -l and it was there.... but it was last reboot... i didn't touch anything...

however i still rebooted... i can still boot into windows using lilo boot loader... booting vmlinuz still has small fonts and i can't see my windows harddrives (they are SATA and i do have scsi support for disks enabled) and when i boot to bzImage, the fonts have never changed but i still don't have usb support (and i do have it enabled as well)

I would like to learn from this and fix it without restarting.... however someone here things that it would probably be better to restart i will.
any help is very much appreciated.

Check the guide in my sig, it tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

Thanks for the good read texmex. as it didn't answer all my questions, through trial and error i was able to figure out most of everything i needed or wanted to know.

the one thing i haven't figured out yet though was when in xconfig (or whatever menuconfig editor) i don't understand the big difference between loading something into the kernel or as a module. the one thing i learned was that if i had DRM loaded into the kernel, the ati drivers would not work. loading the fglrx.o would fail. i changed DRM to load as a module and it worked. but i don't see DRM in my lsmod... kind of weird.
any ideas?

Well, if you compile things as modules they are loaded as needed. It's probably better to compile most things as modules, because, as you said, they can cause problems if compiled in, and then you have to recompile the kernel.

Things you should compile into the kernel are definitely filesystem support, and other things NOT included in the 'device drivers' section.

Okay, i think i understand a little bit more.
like for instance. i've been messing around and seeing if my system needs via-agp or my amd64-agp for 3d rendering. i've got it working with amd64-agp but not via-agp.
i have my via-agp loaded as a module but right after boot it doesn't show up in lsmod. so from what your saying my system doesn't reconize that and there for doesn't load which which means i don't need it correct?

i dont see how compiling any thing into the kernel can be worse than as a module,unless things are required to be a module like the usb support as a module so you can unmount your ipod safely. my rule is if i use it most/all the time its compiled it and if my computer supports it, it goes as a module

yes that's right, if the module isn't loaded and everything works, you probably don't need it.