Controlling which modules are loaded at boot

[Doofus <doofus@bulldoghome.com>]

Dell Inspiron
sarge/2.4.27

Not strictly a laptop question this, but...
The last time I spent my quality time playing with debian this subject 
mostly came down to the contents of /etc/modules. I've just compiled a 
new kernel and although  it's highly modular and I've emptied 
/etc/modules, all manner of guff is auto-loaded that I really just want 
to load manually as and when needed - especially on a battery powered 
laptop (eg hw_random,  ide_cs for a pcmcia microdrive, ieee1394, and 
even the USB modules).

Can someone tell me where things have changed and what I should be doing 
to prevent auto-loading of anything I choose (or what I should be 
reading). At first glance it seems to be a mixture of the hotplug 
subsystem and some new hardware discovery utility? Does /etc/modules 
even have a worthwhile function anymore, or are we headed for a virtual 
plug and play "ah - we're so clever we know what all your hardware is 
and therefore insist on spinning your microdrives until your battery is 
dead wether you're using it or not" scenario? Ignore my cynicism, it 
just doesn't seem very linux-like anymore; we could have all this with 
windows 98.

Lastly, I'll be very grateful if someone explain and tell me how I can 
trace the failure in the following bit of boot message:

   usb.c: registered new driver hub
   uhci.c: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v1.1
   uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xbf80, IRQ 11
   usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
   hub.c: USB hub found
   hub.c: 2 ports detected
   uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xbf20, IRQ 11
   usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
   hub.c: USB hub found
   hub.c: 2 ports detected
        uhci: loaded successfully
      pci      [success]
      usb
      usb      [success]
      isapnp
      isapnp   [success]
      ide
      ide      [success]
      input
      input    [failed]
      scsi
      scsi     [success]
   done

Cheers.