Hi. My Gentoo 2.6.8.1-nitro1 kernel boots up just fine. However, when I try and do much of anything I get the following message:

Unable to handle kernel paging requestion.

*printing eip: <long number>

It hardlocks there (although there's a nice blinking cursor at the end of the message ) What does this mean, and how can I fix it?

did you just build this kernel
or has it been working fine and now suddenly is not ?????
first guesses in order:
a nitro patch applied to the kernel that is not for the kernel version.
a nitro patch applied to the kernel that is just bad code and broke your kernel
incompatability between a nitro patche and your version of gcc or glibc
might be a bad kernel build like optimized for the wrong proccessor or something.
kernel modules for the wrong kernel version installed in kernel.
might be something broken within libc gcc producing bad code ??

might be something broken hardware