If you have a mainboard with an AMD chipset (as many modern Athlon boards do), then I recommend using a non-standard kernel. Jussi Laako has backported IDE drivers from 2.5 kernel branch to 2.4. His patches-page can be found here: http://www.pp.song.fi/~visitor/linux/. You should use the 2.4.19-pre7-jl1-11 patch, previous versions of the IDE driver have paritally broken IRQ handling. You will need to fetch the 2.4.19-pre series of kernels of course, but it's worth the effort. I'm currently using that kernel and it has much better IDE performance (no latency problems anymore) and is very stable (at least on my SMP box).
	If you want to use VMWare 2.x series on newer 2.4 kernels, it is possible, but some minor patches have to be applied both to the kernel and the VMWare. If you need the patches, drop me a line.
	If you have a BT848-based TV card, you may have to compile it into the kernel for some recent 2.4 and 2.5 versions. If you have to, don't forget to specify bttv.tuner and bttv.card kernel parameter (e.g. in lilo or loadlin), otherwise your card won't be detected. For example my miro PCTV Pro needs bttv.tuner=0 bttv.card=11. Basically parameters you used with insmod need to be specified, but with the bttv. prefix.
	If you didn't do it yet, fetch XFree86 v4.2.0 or later. One of the great features is integrated font anti-aliasing, implemented by the Xft module. Enable it in your XF86Config by adding True-Type fonts to your FonPath and using type1 and freetype modules. Unfortunately the application have to support it as well. For example QT toolkit does - compile it with -Xft option and you'll get very nice anti-aliased fonts in all apps that use QT. There is a patch for GTK as well, but since I don't use any GTK apps (and mozilla doesn't seem to honor the patch) I couldn't test it.