As per advice, located old mobo cd and used it to instal the ethernet driver(windows says that you dont need one).Yellow "ethernet" in Device manager turned pale and "controller" appeared,also "connection" icon (saying,cable disconnected) appeared in the taskbar.Dug out modem/router driving instructions from another site and away we went.It may be my imagination but everything seems faster,using ethernet instead of usb.
thanks for all the help.
regards