Problem solved. network services start but do not respond

PROBLEM SOLVED. For reason's I haven't diagnosed yet, it seemed that
ufw disable
did not cure the problem, so I also did
iptables -F
But apparently this is to aggressive and filtering must explicitly be turned on with explicit setting of ACCEPT on INPUT, FORWARD, and OUTPUT. I don't understand why sudo ufw disable is insufficient to turn off the firewall, but that is a different issue. Possibly I have whacked iptable rules.

After reboot required by kernel upgrade, for (at least) ssh and http, my services are running and listening, but apparently not responding
Ubuntu 9.04
kernel 2.6.31-22-server
Hardware is Dell R300
removed and reinstalled openssh-server
Note also that sometimes on reboot, networking starts before the dhcp server has issued a lease, so I am forced to restart networking by hand. But that seems to have no impact on the problem. Specific case is this:

0. ssh client on the same subnet or at a distance always times out.
1. ps uax | grep sshd shows sshd is running
2. tcpdump shows kernel receives packets
3. netstat shows there is a listener on port 22 with same pid as revealed in 1.
4. sshd_config has
SyslogFacility AUTH and LogLevel VERBOSE
but no logs in /var/log seem to record any events associated in time with with the client request, nor does sshd_config suggest to me that logging might be in some other directory.
5. iptables are flushed
6. outbound ssh works fine, so I don't(?) suspect the network
7. restarting networking has no effect on the problem
8. sudo nmap -sV -p 22 <ip address> shows "Operation not permitted", but no entry in any log in /var/log corresponds to the scan time or packet id.
9. booting on either of the previous two kernels 2.6.31-20 or -17 has no effect on the problem, though I had a long successful run on each.
10. Power cycling the hardware has no effect on the problem

Similarly for http

What the heck am I looking for????

Thanks
Bob