Knoppix not functional

[Capt. Cautious]

Good Day Folks;
I am a relative newbie to knoppix & Linux. I am a doctor by profession so computers while I enjoy them are not my forte. I have been enjoying my experience with knoppix up until the 3.8 & 3.9 distros. Let me start with some background. I have a HP ze4500 and had not been able to get any version of Knoppix to reach the Internet. With the advent of the Union FS on 3.8 i finally was able to reach the net and enjoy the main reason for which I wanted knoppix, anonymous browsing. Nothing illegal I just like my privacy. This way I can use the work system ( dsl) w/o creating problems.
Then with 3.8 eventually the disk would not work right, not seeing the i-net, not consistently seeing or accessing the usb drives the impossibility of it ever seeing the knoppix image & config.tbz on th usb drives, and the change to /mnt/uba rather than /dev/sda and so on. I thought that I'd possibly damaged the disk. So I burned a new one from th original iso, same problem immediately. I downloaded and verified a new .iso. Burned it and again it worked fine for about four to five uses or so and went back to the same problems. NEXT::
With the advent of 3.9 I thought that here would be, as the last distro before forking, the crowning achievement of the Knoppix distro. I wanted to get it since I have them all since 3.3. After download I fired up the first distro, ran checkcd and it was fine. I used the disk for nearly a month and then all of a sudden it stopped seeing the i-net. I got around that by going in as root and editing the resolv.conf file and adding the DNS nameservers 4.2.2.4 & 4.2.2.5. So far so good, but why wouldn't it see the i-net like it used to? I couldn't figure that out. Then when I needed it most to try and f-disk a new drive it wouldn't run right and not only would not see the usb drives if it saw them it couldn't mount them. It would not allow any mount commands and would not allow me to access root via su – it hung and eventually required a hard power off reboot. Even when it let me log out it hung on the system after sending the first two kill commands and then hung there requiring a power off reboot.
Again, I reburned the 3.9 .iso; again it works fine, for how long? For how Long?
I am not technically good enough to find the bugs and re-master the cd but I am beginning to think that even with the advent of the Union fs, and I am not certain that is not part of the problem, knoppix may no longer be dependable for what I need it. With 3.6 and 3.7 respectively I have saved data that would have been lost on windows crashed hard drives, I have fixed and restored broken network issues, found and fixed problems that would have otherwise cost me hundreds of dollars I don't have, so not being a programmer, not even being competent enough to compile or re-master, I can no longer be confident that knoppix is usable. Where do I go from here? I really need the recovery and network tools.

If the nature of this post causes problems please let me know and I'll drop it.

[foamrotreturns]

That is quite a story! I have a ze4500 series notebook as well, and I would like to do what I can to help you.
Can you tell us what method you are using to access the network? Is it wireless? Wired? what is displayed when you type ifconfig at the command prompt?