Well, after hacking away at the kernal and all kinds of other things, I
now seem to have usb working. Seems that I missed the usb controller
drivers. The weird thing is that on boot, I still get the mount point
does not exist message. Now, though, I get this:

root@slakbox:~# mount
/dev/hda2 on / type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /fat-c type vfat (rw,umask=000)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

even though my fstab still says:

none /sys/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0

I don't know what that's all about, but it works, so I can't complain.
Thanks to everyone for all of your help.

Shilo