And, I should also say, thatnk you very much!

Yes - I tried tonyyoungblood's drive cache workaround, and it appears to have solved my issue.

I had to run the autorun.sh file first (which I always had to do, because of the fact that it was not retaining the driver), and after that command was successful, I ran the update-initramfs -u command (specifically sudo update-initramfs -u), restarted the machine, opened a terminal session, ran lsmod, and got the r8168 driver in the list instead of r8169. From what I can tell with initial testing of large downloads and going to Internet web sites, it is functioning well.

I'm running 64-bit ubuntu (release 11.04). Would this possibly have anything to do with the problems I am having?

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?

Thanks - Exactly what I needed!