Comment 4 for bug 130715

Okay I found the problem and the solution but it is still a bug.

my /etc/network/interfaces
was trying to bring up the device before it was ready and thus creating a bogus empty pid file.

By commenting essentially everything out of the file I got normal behavior back. (In this case I mean normal except that the netowork managers seem useless.)

That being said this is still clearly a bug.