Hardy Haron Upgrade Difficulties

I upgraded my ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 yesterday and I ran into a few snags. First of all the number pad on my keyboard wasn't working. That problem was easy to fix. I just had to uncheck "Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard" on the 'Mouse Keys' tab in System->Preferences->Keyboard.

The second problem was that I didn't have an internet connection. I could ping my gateway and I was getting dns, but I could not ping ip's or names on the internet. Oddly my VirtualBox virtual machines were online and I was able to browse the net on them without any problems.

I have yet to get this problem completely fixed, but I have found a workaround. I use bridged network adapters for my virtual machines, so I have a bridge setup that only includes eth0 and I have two VirtualBox adapters setup.

First I had to remove the virtualbox adapters
VBoxDeleteIF vbox0
VBoxDeleteIF vbox1

Next I had to remove the bridge (br0) by editing the /etc/network/interfaces file to look like this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

After making that change I had to reboot (/etc/init.d/networking restart wasn't enough for some reason)

When everything had booted back up I changed /etc/network/interfaces back to this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0

I saved the file and ran /etc/init.d/networking restart

Finally I recreated the VirtualBox adapters
VBoxAddIF vbox0 pete br0
VBoxAddIF vbox1 pete br0

Everything worked after doing all of this, but if I restart I have to redo everything! :( I hope to find a fix or at least a better workaround for this problem soon.