FFP stops talking to the internet

I set up FFP on a 1 GB thumb drive yesterday, along with Thunderbird, Foxit Reader, NVU Portable, and a couple other apps. Firefox was up & running like a champ, I imported my bookmarks from my home installation of Firefox, and I was quite happy with it (digital watch & all ).
Seeing as how I still had a ton of space left over on my drive, I got a bright idea (queue dramatic music of something bad about to happen) and attempted to install a minimalist version of Linux on the same drive.
Before i go any further, let me explain my rationalle. The linux installtion (http://runt.mybox.org/) is intended to function if the flash drive is used as a bootable device. The install only uses about 128 MB and a posting on the discussion board for the distro even seems to suggest that it's possible to save media to the drive & access it again http://runt.mybox.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=57&start=0&postdays=0&posto...
Thus, I didn't see this coming. That said, I can still launch FFP and I can access my bookmarks while booting off my harddrive in Windows. I fail to see why FFP can no longer see the internet. Ideas? TIA.