Comment 8 for bug 240337

The problem is now fixed. It turns out that the Loopback Network Interface wasn't working properly. I came to realise that any attempt to access anything via 127.0.0.1 or localhost was hanging for an extended period. 'ifup lo' told me I had a duplicate command at line 16 of /etc/network/interfaces. The line wasn't a duplicate (it said 'manual ppp0') but I took it out and hey presto, ifup lo didn't give me an error, and everything works.