Ok, I want to end up with something i can experiment with xen but have a kernel that doesn't have a lot of unused modules and such and answer the question, what is the best Debian way to do this.

apt-cache search linux xen

I pick what looks like the latest one out of the list

apt-get source linux-image-2.6.18-5-xen-686

I get a line that looks like

Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main linux-2.6 2.6.22-6 (dsc) [4825B]
Get:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main linux-2.6 2.6.22-6 (tar) [57.4MB]

Interesting...it is bringing down 2.6.22, must be matching what I currently have installed...

Ok, that's done

now

dpkg-source -x linux-2.6_2.6.22-6.dsc

dpkg-source: extracting linux-2.6 in linux-2.6-2.6.22
dpkg-source: unpacking linux-2.6_2.6.22.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: applying ./linux-2.6_2.6.22-6.diff.gz

now...what i kind of think should happen next is

make menuconfig...will that take my current working configuration into account?