Network Interface Conundrum

   I've been trying to solve this problem since I bought the Sony Vaio at the
end of last November (10 months ago). It's running 13.37/x86_64 with the
3.2.7 kernel (needed to solve the brand-new video issue) and has all the
updates installed.

   The problem is that the laptop cannot connect to a wireless network. It
can communicate with the access point, but not send packets to the server
behind that. I tracked the issue to the presence of eth0 even when there is
no ethernet cable connected. Looking at the contents of
/sys/class/net/eth0/carrier shows '0', no ethernet connected. wicd-client
can bring up wlan0, but packets seem to prefer to go out the non-functional
eth0 interface instead.

   ifplugd is invoked during boot (/etc/rc.d/init.d/ifplugd), but it does not
take down eth0 when there's no cable attached. As root I can run 'ifconfig
eth0 down' and eth0 goes away so wlan0 works, but that is not a solution for
the user of the portable.

   There must be something fairly simple that I'm not finding in my Web
searches. The system recognizes no ethernet cable, but the interface is
still UP but not RUNNING.

   This is the only portable of 6 running linux over the years that has this
issue. The solution is beyond my experience and knowledge; your help is
solicitied and will be well received.

Rich