I gave a copy of my live CD to a friend and he has installed Ubuntu to his computer with no problems at all and he really likes it so that has made me pig sick. He said it did do one thing, he thinks it changed some of his bios settings? Should this have happened and if so would I need to change some of my bios settings? Just a thought, apart from that his computer is running fine he has a duel boot same as mine.

I know what I have just asked is shooting in the dark, but apart from coming on here and asking I do not know what else to do. But I have this feeling that I am not going to get Linux working on my computer so will just have to stick with windows xp

Have you tried another distribution other than Ubuntu? Perhaps Fedora - I think they have a LiveCD spin these days so you could try that and see if that works...

Obviously Ubuntu is working OK, there's just "something" about your computer it can't handle... Maybe Fedora will? Maybe Fedora will handle it enough to give a meaningful error...

I've looked at your post and when you ran ifconfig I didn't see any addressing for eth0 only loop back. Being unfamiliar with ubantu I don't know what network config program to run. In slackware it'netconfig

hope this helps