Thanks to everyone who replied.  The winning response goes to Jan :) 
I've included here because it's a very neat little trick to know and 
worth squirreling away.  As he (and Bob Blair) suspected, the in-tree 
driver does not support the chip which I verified with Jan's suggestion. 
  I've loaded the latest driver from the realtek site and it works just 
fine.

Thanks again.  Happy holidays to all.

Ken


Jan Iven wrote:

> 
> Drivers evolve and add support for new devices. Your sysrescuecd simply 
> might have a newer version of the driver. Since this is an in-tree 
> driver, the fact that you cannot install SL45 over it is a good 
> indication that it won't be useful later either (unless your 
> installation puts an updated kernel on the disk that now has an updated 
> driver).
> 
> To verify:
> try "lspci", identify your network card slot (e.g. '01:0d.0'). Run 
> "lspci -vvn -s 01:0d.0". This gives the PCI Id in numeric form (01:0d.0 
> Class 0280: MAJOR MINOR..)
> 
> Then run "modinfo r8169". This will give a list of PCI IDs (major and 
> minor ID concatenated into one big hex number) this driver feels 
> responsible for. If your card isn't in there, the driver will ignore it.
> 
> If it is there, the driver still may look at the "Subsystem" ID and 
> decide it cannot handle that flavour of the card - unfortunately there 
> you would need to look into the driver source code to make sure.
> 
> The "modinfo" command is something you can run both on SL4 and inside 
> the rescue CD, just to see the differences.
> 
> With the PCI ID, you can the start Googling for which exact version of 
> the driver added support for your card.. or for other drivers that also 
> might be able to support this.
> 
> 
> best regards
> Jan
> 
> 
> 
>