Well, after all that discussion about the driver from Realtek for the 8168 chipset (the r1000 module), I updated my kernel. This, of course, was going to mean that I had to rebuild the r1000 module, until I plugged in my ethernet cable and it sprung to life using the r8169 module.
From the kernel-<flavour> changelog:
* Wed Nov 15 2006 - x@y - patches.drivers/r8169-update-2.6.19: Update Realtek r8169 to support newer chipsets.
Rar!
This is on Factory, not sure where users of older versions get the latest kernel from these days...