I also have this problem, although I've found that I can manually start dbus using "sudo /etc/init.d/dbus start" that dbus is properly initialized.
It gives all the normal messages when starting: * Starting system message bus dbus [ ok ] * Starting Hardware abstraction layer hald [ ok ] * Starting DBUS aware dhcp client: dhcdbd [ ok ] * Starting NetworkManager daemon [ ok ] * Starting NetworkManager dispatcher [ ok ] * Starting System Tools Backends system-tools-backends [ ok ] and it gives no indications why it didn't start correctly in the first place. -- [Edgy]HAL crash on startup https://launchpad.net/bugs/63471 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs