32 bit bigotry running under 64 bit 2.6.6?

["Chris Horn" <chris@beefstew.net>]

So, my new hardware (Asus SK8V + Opteron) came and is installed.  The
machine is running, thanks to the DFS AMD64 kernel.  My old custom 32 bit
2.4.22 kernel wouldn't boot, so I booted from the DFS CD and used the
mount-the-system-disks, chroot and dpkg-repack trick to get the new AMD64
one installed.

As expected, though, I can't compile anything for 64 bits (everything in
userland is 32; there is no /lib64 directory).  For me, this was the
nVidia X drivers.  After some thought, though, I've decided this is okay.

For the time being, I'm going to sit out 64 bits just run everything in
32.  Sure it won't be 20% faster, but I don't really want to use Mandrake
or SuSE and Debian doesn't seem ready enough for me to run a multiarch (or
biarch) setup.

My question is this:
I'm trying to recompile a custom 2.6.6 kernel, but the configurator won't
let me choose anything but a 64 bit kernel!  What's going on!?!  Since my
2.4.22 one won't boot, how am I supposed to build a kernel that will just
mope around in 32 bits until Debian biarch gets on its feet?  Do I need to
install a pre-packaged K7 kernel, or something?

Thanks.
Chris Horn.