wired networking does not work in Intrepid

Yesterday I upgraded from the standard dell ubuntu 8.04.1 for lpia to ubuntu 8.10 for i386 using a bootable usb stick. I'm quite pleased that most stuff just works right off the bat.

One thing that doesn't work though is my wired networking! After the install of Intrepid I think it all worked fine. Then it asked to get all the updates, about 200MB of updates or so, and then neither my wireless or wired networking would work at all. They would both sit there trying to acquire an IP address. I have another ubuntu machine (8.10) that happily connects to the router so I know the router is just fine.

After a bit of playing around I installed wicd as my network manager and now wireless networking often(!) works (it might just be that it works the first time after boot). But wired networking refuses to work at all. It does all the steps as you'd expect and then sits there trying to obtain an IP address. Interestingly even with the ethernet cable unplugged wicd tries to connect to the wired network as the desktop starts up and stops at obtaining IP address.

I'm using the broadcom restricted wireless driver. From ifconfig - the dropped frame count is continually increasing:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:21:70:c7:fe:77
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:520087009 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:5 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:220 Base address:0xa000

Any ideas?