Following my post related to NetworkManager. I have found out about the workaround. If you have x86_64 system with 4GB support enabled, you should disable it in order to make NetworkManager work. I am not sure if that bug affects other distributions so, possibly the bug may be related to the x86_64 kernel. Let see if my theory can be verified.
Running rawhide 20090924 from desktop system , I test gnome-shell to explore its features (seems Activities name is inspired from Sugar interface . Very disappointing because the shell needs hardware acceleration i.e 3D support. Even Sugar interface did a much better job despite its simple look. Picture speaks itself.
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Currently using x86_64 with 4gb + networkmanager. No such issues.
Its a Thinkpad T61 with Intel 3945ABG wireless
Turns out it is something specific to the Marvell network card. I have two NICs on my motherboard and I tried the other one (Nvidia) and network seems to work perfectly! So maybe your problem could be fixed/worked around by trying a different network card.
When I upgraded from 2GB to 4GB, I went into the BIOS, Ctrl-F1 to get to the advanced chipset features, then enabled 4G RAM support. After that, when I booted I couldn't access the network. Interestingly, there was a boot-time message from the kernel
skge eth1: enabling interface, so I didn't look there for the problem.
After reading the posts here I went back, disabled 4G support and got my network back - at the cost of a few hundred MB of RAM. The kernel now only sees 3584MB instead of the 4096MB it saw before.
Pete