LinuxQuestions.org - modprobe FAILURE errors on boot

Ok, I recently installed 9.1 (yeah I'm a noob.. actually to linux in general but I've used mandrake before some). Anyhow, I've been getting along pretty well, even managed to compile my own kernel (2.6.5) for slack and.. I've got 3 problems.. Problem 1 is the most important of them at the moment. Also, the others are sometimes basic questions so if you are annoyed that I'm asking here and not searching for the answer just ignore them and help me with the first 1 I've tried to get help on (actually have on the others but not extensively)
1 is what is mentioned in the title.. I get modprobe failures in boot that say via_agp already in kernel (because I compiled it into there). I'm sure this is probably just stuff left over from when I miscompiled the kernel or whatever.. but how do I get rid of it? I've looked through some of the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules type files and can't really see what I'm looking for to get rid of these messages caused by I guess attempts to load modules that are already taken care of on the kernel level.

2 is that I'm not sure if my ATI driver is working or not. I looked about and noticed I needed to rpm2tgz the package.. I think installpkged the driver and ./make ./make_install and all of that.. it says success but it didn't give the warning messages like ATIs site said it would. Not at first it was failing because I didn't compile unload support into the kernel (I used just autoload because that's what's default).. Anyway.. I should know this but how exactly do I check whether it's the correct driver running.

3 is that mozilla thunderbird for some reason is having trouble. I succesfully figured out how to add it and firefox to the menu but for some reason thunderbird is giving an error

Code:

Resource problem creating '/tmp/orbit-xanas'

aborting...

./run-mozilla.sh: line 451:  1009 Aborted                "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

And.. I've thought maybe this had something to do with tmp folder attributes and looked at the manual for chmod but I really don't fully understand how the numbers work. For example I used chmod 777 tmp and I could read it from non-root but I couldn't create directories (not sure about normal files).. so If someone could provide I'd be interested in a short discussion of permission settings.