Just to throw a spanner in the mix, heres what happened to me - weird but it did
I installed kubuntu 710
Everything was cool, then i installed the LinuxMCE part way through the install after restarting the network everything went stupid and nothing was available.
So I started checking network settings and running continual pings to the box during the install.
Wow low and behold the lan drops for a network restart and DOES NOT return
Yet if i switch to a console, i could restart the lan (but by that time the install had choked fubar)
So to get around it, I had to manually add a 5 second delay to the network script
Yes the kubuntu one, nothing to do with linuxmce whatsoever as far as I can tell, it ws the standard /etc/init.d/networking file
sleep 5
was added to the end of the stop section.
After that I installed without issue.