Alright, my problem is a bit strange in that it developped on its own (sort of). Power got cut to my computer, when it came back online my internet was no longer working. (Cable) It was working previously. So I tried various things, yadda, yadda, eventually got around to checking the physical aspects, turns out the spot on the router was malfunctioning. So I change the slot, but now my internet still doesn't work. I've tried even installing Slack and Gentoo distros and doing their network setups from scratch, no dice.

So if someone could either give me tips on stuff i might not have tried, or maybe give me a from-scratch-manual-setup for Slackware or Gentoo (even though it's supposed to be automatic DHCP.. bah) that'd be appreciated.

well, first give us the output of /sbin/ifconfig eth0

Then we'll go from there.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:53:80:5A:93
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2265 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:35 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:139764 (136.4 Kb) TX bytes:9440 (9.2 Kb)
Interrupt:19 Base address:0xe400

Right now you don't seem to have an ip address. Issue the command /sbin/ifdown eth0 followed by /sbin/ifup eth0 and lookat the output of /sbin/ifconfig eth0 again. Hopefully the dhcp will renew. If it doesn't you can try manually assigning it an internal ip. To do that

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 ip address 192.168.1.9 (or other address as is appropriate with your internal addressing scheme.)
/sbin/route add -net default gw 192.168.1.1 (or whatever your internal default gateway should be.)

then check the output of /sbin/ifconfig eth0 again. If you've got an ip addy, try pinging your own address, then the router, then something external.

What I don't get though is why your ifconfig info shows that you've been sending and receiving just fine.... Maybe someone else understands this better than I do?

That's the funny thing. I've been tweaking it around some, and I've gotten it to the point where (using service network restart among others) it shows as up, broadcasting, with all the right IP info and suchlike, and netstat shows the connection to the DNS servers

but then when I try to ping any address, it says network unreachable.
Interestingly, also, when I ping the computer fromo another comp on the same router, it responds properly - except it responds as some bizarre address, 10.70.64.1 (which is, needless to say, nowhere in any config files). And when pinged from outside the network, it responds properly with the correct ip.
As far as receiving packets, if I do a tcpdump after forcing the interface to believe it's up, I receive all the usual messages (arp who-has , etc)

I'm extremely puzzled by all this. Any and all help appreciated

what does the output of /sbin/route show? Does it make sense?

I'll give it a shot, but (following the gentoo install directions) i did a /sbin/route add -net default gw (gateway) netmask 0.0.0.0 and it simply replied with something along the lines of SIOADDRT: Network unreachable

I'll check the output of straight /sbin/route though.

I've seen that before. I can't remember the problem exactly though. My only further suggestions for right now, besides checking the routing table as you said, is to make sure that your netmask is correct(your network isn't subnetted strangely is it?), and also you mentioned pinging from another computer and getting a strange address. First, I assume then you've got some kind of internal DNS or no? What should it respond with if not the 10.x.x.x number? a 192.168.x.x number?