Thanks for the reference - I have the same chipset on my Dell Dimension 2400 and
will be facing the same problem when I install 9.10. (I won't attempt *that*
until I re-partition to preserve my operational 8.04 LTS configuration.)

I've done driver builds before (ACPI for a Toshiba laptop), but this one looks
harder. A quick review suggests that there's more to it than just a simple
installable kernel module.

Can you double-check whether you have the "xserver-xorg-video-intel" package
installed? (System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager, and enter
"video-intel" in the Quick Search box.)