Networking :: Communication Manager Daemon And HP Laptops With Synaptics Pointing Device?

I have installed 10.04 on several machines as well as imbedded inside VISTA. All of these installs work fine except the one on my HP Pavillion dv9000. The synaptics device on these machines is very touchy in all operating systems, but caused a strange issue in ubuntu 10.10. While connected to the internet and working fine I barely touched the pad and everything quit. I rebooted and found no way to reconnect to the internet. On the panel there was a little icon about the connection manager. Hovering over this icon gave the message "Connection Manager daemon not working". The usual tab to "enable networking" was dim and could not be activated.

I searched for several hours and found no reference regarding this daemon. Is there a source of the op sys names for such daemons and what sort of terminal command would I use to restart it if I knew what it was called? I ended up scrubbing the partition and reinstalling. Even the recovery process would not get the daemon to restart.