Vista - Internet Problems

As soon as I went to Vista, I was the victim of an onslaught of problems,
firstly, Windows Explorer wouldn't work correctly, and anytime I'd load into
a profile, I would get continuing error messages displayed until I logged
out, somehow I bypassed this by using a seperate profile, in which it only
came up one time, which still worries me.

Now, my new problem, I can't connect to the internet. I'm running off of an
nForce 2 Motherboard from Gigabyte, the K7 Triton series to be exact. More
exact, the GA-7N400-L board, this board contains onboard Realtek 8100c
ethernet. Though, whatever I do, I cannot connect to the internet, my entire
family's upset, as well as my being very perturbed after spending hours going
over the seperate settings. I've tried it on DSL, which is the Internet
selection at my home, and I've also tried it at my current location which is
Cable from Charter, it works at neither and encounters the exact same
problem. It states that there's a problem connecting from my computer to the
network, then there's a red X in-between Network and internet. There's no
activity at all, this is a great annoyance and I've tried everything in my
power: (Modem Reset, Re-configurations, etc.) All of the basic things I've
tried, I was wondering if anyone else here can help me, because I'd really
like to avoid having to reformat my drive to get back to XP, thanks.