. . . even cutting the PCB back to the bare minimum so as to just barely allow room for the outboard row of pins for your RA Male connector, you're talking about .95" of assembly width and more like 1.05" from the surface of the adapted card as shown.

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Yeah, the HD cage is going to be in the way.

Try swapping the connector configurations, put a straight up Male Connector on a Verticallly oriented PCB, with the Right (Left?) Angle Female Connector mounted to that vertical PCB.

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Makes sense. I don't think there's a left version, so the keying will be off if I'm looking at it right.

Well, I think you've convinced me to try removing the connector again on the Asante NIC. Would you be able to describe the steps, such as desolder then bite into the connector, or desolder after? How far down do you have to bite down, can you get away with going down half way?

I was also thinking about cutting into it with Dremel cutting wheel and chopping it down to ~1/3 the height. The approach here is to try to free up the pins so they can be removed individually without being incased in the connector's plastic housing.