Gaargh! Upgraded Ubuntu and simply upgraded my existing problem. For some reason which I cannot fathom, my desktop with it’s nice wired connection is not permitted to connect automatically. With the wonderful new GUI based tools I can’t simply tweak the boot scripts to fix it.

This is definitely more painful then needed, but this works (with thanks to the people over at the Ubuntu forum):

1) Setup /etc/network/interfaces to have an appropriate entry for the         
interface you use such as: 

   1: auto eth0

   2: iface eth0 inet dhcp

You may also wonder why that entry is not already there… I know I did!

2) Purge the Network manager: 

   1: sudo aptitude purge network-manager network-manager-gnome

3) KILL the remaining Network Manager processes (if you don’t; any DHCP sessions you try and create will not bind) 

   1: root      5749     1  0 11:59 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/nm-system-settings   

   2: --config /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

   3: xxxxx     6328  6086  0 11:59 ?        00:00:01 nm-applet --sm-disable

4) Restart the networking: 

   1: sudo /etc/init.d/network restart

The Pros of this approach ? There is now hopefully only one thing managing your network and it will no longer do it by creating merged config files in /run to do it. The Cons ? You lose your nice status icon. You may get over that.