Hey Grans, thanks a lot for pointing out the embarrassingly obvious, that I had put the wrong dns addresses in resolv,conf
I will swear though that the first time around, i.e. when I upgraded from 10.3, the resolv.conf file would have had the correct addresses in it because the upgrade process does not change your existing config.
In any event, I had changed it to be the address of my router, i.e. namesever 192.168.0.1 but that did not work either.
Now I can set my resolv.conf to use either my router address or the isp dns addresses which are actually 194.168.4.100 and 194.168.8.100, with complete success either way. So it looks like that last complete install on to a freshly formatted partition fixed things, even though I had done that before.
*cough* note the subtle difference in the actual isp dns addresses and the ones I had entered
Now I have a dilemma in that for the first time in a very long period, I have both SUSE and Mandriva working installations on my system.
Oh well it will be interesting to compare both distros. Already I can say that they both incorrectly state the speed of my Q6600 as 3.6Ghz when it is in fact 3.2Ghz.
I will need to resolve this dilemma soon though, as one of them will need to make way for Windows 7 RC.
Hey Grans, thanks for the reply which made me look at the SUSE distro again, otherwise I might not have looked for acouple of weeks. Guess it was a case of "can't see the wood for the trees" in the end.
PPS: On a good ending, I can say that the r8169 driver is definitely working correctly in the latest kernels.