Ack!!!! I finally figured out why udev wasn't working on the laptop. It turns out that the symlink I made from the /etc/udev/rules.d directory to the network.rules file was named 010_network_rules. That '_' before the 'rules' in the symlink needed to be a '.' so apparently the file was never read by udev. Such a simple solution to something which has consumed many hours, not to mention the elevated stress levels. Ah well, at least it's working again. Now I can get back to moving over to the new wireless router.