Something very strange is going on!

I was mucking about, recompiling my kernel.. same kernel as the default.. ie. 2.6.18-chw-13
except that I turned off SMP, because of known issues with SMP and the wireless module that I had compiled.. I changed EXTRAVERSION in the Makefile to avoid conflict with existing kernel.

I made the kernel and as sometimes happens it had problems, X failed to start. I rebooted with old kernel and low and behold it also had a problem with X. -- No problem, I backed up my modules. I restored my 2.6.18-chw-13 from my backup.. but it didn't fix the problem. I dug around a bit more and found that ivtvfb was not loading.. so I did modprobe ivtvfb and a kill -1 1 and X was up and going again... But then my hauppauge remote seemed have gone flacky. Ok, I follow tjc's hint and tips and move my ir-kbd-i2c.ko out of the way to fix it..

My question is --

What happened to cause ivtvfb not to load automaticly --
/etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv had not changed.. and why did issue with ir-kbd-i2c.ko pop up..

One of the things that I love about linux, is that it is fairly transparent.. I can usually see why things behave the way do.. but this has me somewhat confused..