Dilema of Kernel upgrade

I enjoy upgrading kernels in my Dell 700m laptop, the new kernel usually brings more functionalities and fixes bugs. In the recent upgrade to suspsend2-source-2.6.22, I found Fn + F7 VGA output does work any longer, which worked perfect in suspend2-sources-2.6.18-r6 that I even regarded it as a built-in feature of BIOS. Right now, I need to explicitly call i855crt to output some shaking rawpipe or 8-bit color palette images to external monitor, both suck.

Maybe it required some other bleeding-edge components. I upgraded the x11-drm and xf86-video-i810 to the unstable ~x86 branch in the portage. Things got even worse. xf86-video-i810-2.0.0 could mirror screen to the external monitor if it was attached in X server launch, that suffice the need of presentation, however, there were two screen 1152x768 and 1280x800 sharing the same desktop in the sole head, that totally confused KDE, and windows’ behaviors were quite weird.

So I went back to xf86-video-i810-1.7.4 for the daily working environment, and reboot the machine to kernel 2.6.18-r6 for the presentation, — that is ridiculous but I could not stick to 2.6.18 kernel since the source tree is deleted, and also removed from the portage. What I have in the hand is the monolithic kernel only.

For the troubleshooting, I compared the .config of 2.6.18 and 2.6.22 head by head, and still could not figure it out what I did wrong. If you manage to make the VGA output work in 2.6.22 kernel, or point out the mistake I have made, please drop a comment here. Thanks.