Verizon Aircard Software disables Ethernet port?

A friend's new company bought him a new Aircard for his Gateway AMD
Turion 64 notebook running WinXP Pro SP2. He wanted me to install it in
his office.

I disconnected his Ethernet wired connection to his office LAN, which is
kept off the net, entirely, because he is a lawyer with very sensitive
files. There is no net or wifi connection to the office main computer.

I plugged in Verizon's driver disk that comes with the Aircard and
installed it defaulted, which went fine. We logged onto the Aircard with
it, everything worked but slower than dirt because Charleston, SC, has no
wifi on Verizon, just a-little-bit-faster-than-dialup. His Wifi to the
net also works as you switch through the Verizon interface between the
Aircard on Verizon and his internal Wifi transceiver built into the
Gateway...that all works fine.

Done with the installation and being invited to a Lawyer's lunch at a
major yacht club I just never turn down, I plugged his notebook back into
the Ethernet cable it came from and watched the icons in the tray to see
if data flow happened. There was a blip of activity as it logged itself
onto the office LAN DHCP. They use an shtml interface to their office
database server so I clicked the logon to put it back where I found it.
IT NO LONGER FUNCTIONS.

FTP'd to the FTP server in their law library....IT NO LONGER FUNCTIONS.
I tried to get his email from the office's email server...IT NO LONGER
FUNCTIONS!

After a few expletives about my old cellphone company making me miss
lunch, I called VZW on 611 from his phone and went through the
interminable menu tree until I found a humanoid who spoke passable
English. I explained our plight, so she switched me to the Aircard
Expert. I explained it all to him and he said, "Can you wait while I
research this?" Of course I could. After 13 minutes 22 seconds, he came
back and simply said, "We do not support that.", referring to the
Ethernet hard wired port on the computer. At that point, I wasn't very
nice and having gotten the company's response I figured that was that.

I uninstalled VZW from the computer, cleaned off the residue from the
Registry it left and deleted all their directory tree, then rebooted.
The Ethernet port still didn't work.....We'd been HIJACKED!

I opened Networking and looked at the Ethernet connection. IT'S FINE!
The port is there, it has connectivity and the few bytes that went back
and forth must be the DHCP server stuffing it with initialize data. But,
somewhere in XP, the PROGRAMS, even Windows own browser, no longer has
connectivity. I find no forcing the browser through some Verizon proxy
engine. None are listed in IE's latest version. No proxy engine is
running shown on Process Explorer (www.sysinternals.com). No Verizon
software is running, no suspicious processes at all. But the "computer"
seems permanently disconnected from its own WORKING Ethernet card and
cache because, "We don't support that."

Any ideas how to recover without reinstalling it all is greatly
appreciated. Why, Verizon, Why?!

My first clue should have been when the ONLY network connectivity listed
on the VZW Aircard program was either VZW's two cellphone connections and
ONLY the Wifi connection. No mention or position to turn Ethernet on and
off....

.