I haven’t touched this distribution in at least a year but someone asked me to look at one earlier today. The symptom – “it wont connect to the Internet – there’s not even an icon in the system tray”.
Linpus is pretty restrictive, I opened Nautilus by clicking “Documents” on the home screen, then a terminal using “File->Terminal”. Running nm-applet from the command line reveals a segfault. Running “sudo nm-applet” doesn’t cause a segfault and allows a connection, obviously lacking access to the keyring. Once connected to a network, running the update application shows a new version of nm-applet available. I ran the updates, rebooted and the issue is solved. It must have been broken in the last set of updates, ran before the user lost nm-applet.
Hope this helps someone. It does illustrate the downside of obfuscation – in this case the user has no feedback as to why there is no network connection.