Solved! (I think!) I did a little searching on the Ubuntu Forums and found the suggestion to try the"sudo apt-get update" command and that seemed to do the trick! There was no un-installing and re-installing of Network Manager, everything just flat worked after the update.Sorry to be such a drama queen, but I think I'm OK...

One other question - In Ubuntu, running updates through Update Manager and Synaptic give the same results. Is the same true here, or should it only be done through Update Manager due to the "edited" nature of Wattos?

Running Wattos R-6 on a Dell “Inspiron” 8000 – Pentium III “Coppermine” processor,  20 GB hard drive, 512 GB RAM (max allowed on this box)   Hi everyone. I had previously had R-5 successfully installed on this machine, but last night decided to do a clean install of R-6 to take advantage of the 5-years LTS. It installed without drama (including recognizing and configuring my wireless network enabled by my SMC wireless dongle), but since my install disk was several months old, I decided to do a system update through the update manager.   I opened Update manager, let it do its “thing” in compiling all the necessary updates, hit the go button and entered my password when required. It started to react normally, but I noticed that the fill bar was not moving at all. I then closed Update manager and went into Synaptic and tried to run an update there, but was told I needed to run “sudo apt-get dpkg configure –a” (I think!). I did, and a lot was going on there – about two pages of code, but it finally said it was done and got back to the prompt. I closed out of the terminal and tried to run an update through Update Manager again. After no results and some investigating I discovered that my network connection was broken …literally broken… as in the connection icon in the taskbar displayed as two disconnected links, and I actually got an error message stating that my connection manager was broken. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t re-connect. I’ve lost connections before and been told I was disconnected, but have never been told my connection was broken. It was late and I gave up for the night.   Now what? I can try connecting to my Ethernet connection to see if I get a connection that way, but somehow I doubt it’s going to work since the message says my network manager is broken, not just disconnected. If it doesn’t, I don’t see any way to try to reinstall anything through Synaptic without internet. Is there something else I can try or should I just try to do another clean install?  FYI, I have used this install disk successfully before on a different computer without any of this drama, so at this point I have no reason to believe it’s corrupted.  Any and all suggestions gratefully accepted.

Dave - I'll apologize in advance and tell you I recently downloaded and burned a copy of Zorin 6  and that's probably what was on my mind when I wrote the wrong version number. However, as trimmed down as Watt OS is, I couldn't find where I  could go to to get my system info. Is there something I need to download from synaptic or did I just miss it? What I wrote on my install disc was "Watt OS-R5" so that's what I'm assuming I have.   Concerning my word processing: I checked and your hunch was right - if I just click "Open" the document opens in Leaf Pad (little green leaf in upper left corner).  However, if  I choose "Open with" and "Libre Office Writer" I do get my text, but it's still intermingled with a bunch of code-like gobble-de-gook. In other words, not a printable (or readable) document. Any suggestions? What about deleting and re-installing LibreOffice?

Dave- Let me double check that and get back to you...I may have slipped a digit. I'll also check to see how the document opens. With any other native install of Abiword in the past, my documents have always defaulted to Abiword unless i clicked on "open with", so I assumed the same was true here. I'll confirm and report to you.