When I tried doing the kernel upgrade to 2.6.17 earlier I made two mistakes which in turn caused failure. First I did not use the image specifically for x86 machines and apparently that image was incompatible with my hardware. The reason the reboot was silent that time is that when grub's menu.lst gets updated, the speakup speech synthesizer selection and all options following it get stripped out of menu.lst so this time before rebooting I checked menu.lst and put them back in. So now the kernel for this machine is current.
