Well, had no help from linux forums and am now too peed off with the random connection drops so the Meerkat is gone.
Will be getting another distro soon, already have PCLinuxOS so might try that but methinks I'll be looking at something like Open Suse because the last thing you want is to be farting around like this when you ain't sure about what you are doing, the learning can come after a basic WORKING setup is operational and it don't look like that is possible easily with Ubuntu.
You would think these issues would be fixed by now, the Realtek chipset problems are not exactly new.....