Ben Collins noted that the screenshot above showed the ralink driver crashing, despite the fact that it is eth0 that is being 'bounced', so I did the following:
0) boot in recovery mode
1) ifconfig
Output shows only eth0 and lo
2) ping www.google.com
Result: ping succeeds
3) use 'dhclient' command
Result: DHCP client lease renewed
4) modprobe -r rt2500
Output: '[42944724.053000] ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:00:09.0 disabled'
Ben Collins noted that the screenshot above showed the ralink driver crashing, despite the fact that it is eth0 that is being 'bounced', so I did the following:
0) boot in recovery mode
1) ifconfig
Output shows only eth0 and lo
2) ping www.google.com
Result: ping succeeds
3) use 'dhclient' command
Result: DHCP client lease renewed
4) modprobe -r rt2500
Output: '[42944724.053000] ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:00:09.0 disabled'
5) ping www.google.com
Result: ping succeeds
6) use 'dhclient' command
Result: DHCP client lease renewed
7) startx
8) stop X (ctrl-alt- backspace)
9) ping www.google.com
Result: ping fails
10) use 'dhclient' command
Result: dhclient times out