Thank you very much, I figured out the problems I was having. Most were usb screw ups. Though there is really little along the lines of documentation for using 2.6.
So if you are like me and using a kernel ]= 2.6, in the kernerl config under device drivers, usb support, enable (I did as a module) Multi-Pourpose USB networking framework (CONFIG_USB_USBNET). This will create the module usbnet which is a replacement for the rather craptastic \'usbdnet\' in previous kernels. That is about the only real difference between using an older kernel and a more recent. Hopefully that might help other people.
