After renaming my real knoppix.img to knoppix.img.sav
I rebooted.
I made a new persistent $home.
I rebooted.
I pinged google.com successfully.
I installed VMware Player 2.02. It looked very nice... detected missing kernel modules and built some.
(vmmon is the kernel tainter btw. It seems to say so on every bootup. You should know that Harry.)
I accepted every default offered.
I rebooted.
I booted up to console.
I pinged google.com successfully.
I started X with init 5
I could not access the internet.

I rebooted.
I Bzipped my brand new home image.
I renamed my real knoppix.img.sav to knoppix.img

I am back online. (whew!!!!!)
If you want a copy of the image... it's 157Mb, but I could put it up on my webspace...
so whatever default caused it I dunno. There are files in /home/knoppix with some cat /dev/vcs1 > filenames.txt

There are no line ends in those... but viewing them in mc works.
Actually maybe I can delete the player's install files from the $home and do the bzip again. Should make it about half that size.
I'll put it up at when I am done.
http://home.comcast.net/~johnrw/knop...vmware.tar.bz2