Dear Louyo,

Yes the network adapter does show up in the removable devices list. 

I did as instructed :

- VM stopped : deleted network adapter

- Start without NIC then stopped VM again

- Reset network config to default

- Added network adapter then booted up the VM

- sudo lspci | egrep -i 'network|ethernet' output command at this point :

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 01)
internet@internet-VM:~$

Please see attached screen capture : network is correctly connected as it displays the icon at the bottom right (circled) but there is no network at the top right (arrow). No network as well in the network panel of the system...

Thanks all for your time fixing this !