I was wondering after I builted a driver for a usb hd today and then installed it to /lib/modules/kernel#, can you do the same if you want to add something as a module but not rebuild the entire kernel. Such as make menuconfg, set the (m)s you want, make dep, make clean, make modules, make modules_install....

Kinda seems like you could do that. Possible???

It would seem the case that it is possible. As an example, one can add the nvidia driver to the kernel modules. I would think you would want to know what you are doing before doing something like that. You probably would want to know what depmod means and things like that

Well it works quite well actually. I was doing some firewall setups that required some kernel mods that I had not marked (y) or (m).. So what I did was this....
Copied my /lib/modules/2.4.22 to a safe location.. cded to my /usr/src/linux.. make menuconfig and (m)ed the desired mods, exited and saved... make dep.. make clean.. make modules.. make modules_install.. Then I cded back to /lib/modules/2.4.22 and compared it to my saved safe one. copied back the miss alsa sound driver directory and my usb hd drivers and a edited a couple of **.maps.. Crossed my fingers and rebooted.. Got a few misdirections that fixed themselves at first shot.. I would say that it is possible to do... My system is just fine now and my firewall is working really well... Which is what I desired as on at least a weekly bases some one manages to get through the first fw and wipe my son's box... Told him that was the cost of being wide open for PtP and on-line games. All other boxes on the net go off-line when the first alerts to intrusion attempts...

Well, as you noticed it works perfectly. This is in fact (part of) the purpose of modules, to be able to (re)compile and replace drivers on the fly.