Ok, I did the lsmod as root and all the orinoco related stuff I got was:
orinoco_pci 4228 0 (autoclean) (unused)
orinoco 36824 0 (autoclean) [orinoco_pci]
hermes 7784 0 (autoclean) [orinoco_pci orinoco]
I did a modprobe -r on all 3 of those listed above and got no errors.
When I tried to modprobe the prism_*'s, modprobe could not locate the modules, which could be part of my problem ;).
So then I did urpmi prism, and from my Linux Format DVD which has MDK 9.2 on it, I got the following installation message:
installing /var/cache/urpmi/rpms/prism2-utils-0.2.1-0.pre11.2mdk.i586.rpm
Then I tried to modprobe prism / prism2 / prism2-utils but modprobe could not find the modules... maybe just doing the urpmi was not enough?
Anyway, hmmm... I'm not sure what is going on... 'cause then in MCC under "Network and Internet" it still says "eth0 No Ip dhcp 8139too down". I'm not sure where the "driver 8139too" came from.
Actually back when I had first installed MDK, I recall it detecting both an eth0 and an eth1, but just the states were both shown as "down."
I wonder if I have somehow screwed things up a bit with all this messing around with network stuff, well I'm sure it is fixable, but I almost wonder if it might be easiest to reinstall MDK 9.2 from my DVD. I have no problem reinstalling since I haven't done anything critical with my current install.... just a thought if it would be easier to work with a clean slate.
thanks for all the help :)