I am happy to say that the failsafe worked, but I did go through the help menu when I had knoppix running and found more cheat codes. I tried noagp and this works .

When knoppix starts up, it loads a screen and at the bottom it says boot:

This is where I have been entering : knoppix noagp, But I use an ASUS motherboard with onboard LAN. Now I can not find a way to have knoppix find this network interface. I have gone into the edit, preferences, adv,and proxies to try to change some settings such as autodetect, etc. So far nothing has worked.

I just wanted to thank you - Rickenbacherus - for the failsafe option!!
I am having fun just going through the different settings and such. If you or anyone has a fix to load the network from the motherboard please help!!!

thank again, John