this blog seems to descibe some the issues i'm having. will try tonight too. http://uksysadmin.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/upgrade-to-ubuntu-11-10-problem-w...
Hmm... I'll have to take that back... Last night, I was experiencing the following error: "Unable to connect to the system bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: Connection refused"
Can't use that laptop anymore right now, as it no longer boots up correctly and has not network connection.
I found a bug report that seems to be common for people migrating from 11.04 to 11.10: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dbus/+bug/811441
Apparently, the changeover from /var/run and /var/lock to /run and /run/lock screwed up things. For some people, the fix described in comment #9 seemed to work: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dbus/+bug/811441/comments/9