On my Pentium 133 laptop, I did a dist-upgrade, and screwed up my kernel install for my custom kernel. I said screw it and installed the newest kernel in debian woody (2.4.18-586tsc) and WOW. I'm blown away here. This is much faster than 2.2.19, and includes everything I could possibly need or ask for in a kernel.
It's been a long time since I've seen a serious enhancement in speed from a kernel upgrade, but today is just full of surprises.
I think it probably has to do with the VM system, because I see the speed increase most when gnome is loading up, and I have 72MB of ram onboard, and it loads almost twice as fast now.
w00 to the Gnome team and the kernel coders!