Yes, both the wired (RTL8101E) and wireless (AR242x 802.11abg) are listed by
lspci. Typing sudo modprobe doesn't give an error message. (What is that
command supposed to do anyway?)

Much to my surprise the atheros card now shows up! Can't ping anything and
no internet connectivity but I'm just rebooting to see if that will make it
work. It does not work yet - can't see my network and can't see the internet
yet, however I'm making some progress. It seems that the routing isn't
working right - and I find that it keeps snapping back to "eth0" even though
I've set it to "ath0" many times.

Thanks for your encouragement. I'm really learning something from this but I
need to learn a lot more. It took me years to get inside all the quirks of
Windows, from 3.0 onwards, so I shouldn't be too surprised that Linux takes
just as long.

Any further thoughts would be valued...