It fixed itself....
I will have to report on my ifconfig output later, but for now the admin pages changed to me having only 2 NICs- I didn't change anything, just swapped the nics twice (I think, didn't realize it had to reboot between each one) but whatever happened I'm back to eth0 being my external and eth1 being my internal and I can get packages from the internet from MDs- haven't tried firefox/konqueror yet.