Sorry - I spoke too soon. This worked the first time that I tried it. However, the next day when I booted up the machine again, r8169 was again loaded. I double checked the blacklist line in blacklist.conf, and verified that it was correctly inserted into the file. I found the location of r8169.ko and removed it from the file system. No luck - each time ubuntu boots, r8169 is right back there, like a bad penny.
Here is the pertinent portion of the blacklist.conf file: # don’t let the realtek r8169 driver load blacklist r8169
Output of the lsmod command (portion): hid 91020 1 usbhid r8169 48022 0 xhci_hcd 77643 0
Not to mention… It seems that running the autorun.sh command before attempting to use the network will cause the system to hang hard, so that I have to manually reset it.
Hers is the folder contents for the kennel drivers scottman@CWK04:/lib/modules/2.6.38-11-generic/kernel/drivers/net$ ls r* r8168.ko rrunner.ko
Any thoughts? Am I missing something? Where is the system getting the r8169 driver from?