Network-manager not able to get ip address through eth0

Network-manager can't connect to my eth0 reliably. When clicking eth0, the icon keeps doing its wave thing trying to connect and after a minute or so gives up. Eth0 is a default network interface connected to a normal router with standard dhcp-server (my mac address is bound to a specific ip address). All options for eth0 in the networking manager are default.

- 'lspci | grep net' and ' lshw -class network' look ok
- Eth0 shows up in ' ifconfig -a', but without a ip-address.
- /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.leases shows an expired lease
- /etc/resolv.conf is empty
- Adding eth0 to /etc/network/interfaces doesn't help (and delays booting up a lot).
- Doing ifconfig up/down doesn't work.
- Doing 'dhclient -r', ' dhclient eth0' doesn't work.
- '/etc/init.d/networking restart' doesn't work.
- 'service network-manager stop', ' service network-manager start' doesn't work.

Stopping the network-manager service and connecting manually through the command line works, as does removing network-manager all together and replacing it with wicd. But those solutions are undesirable.

I haven't tried this yet: http://www.totalcomputersusa.com/2011/10/ubuntu-11-10-booting-system-without-full-network-configuration/ Does that solution make sense?

Any other ideas?