On two different occasions the desktop has died. Have no idea why, also network manager seems to die aswell. I am not a huge forensics guy, so the exact cause is unknown to me at this time. The first time this issue happened I switched distro's after exclaiming a few choice words.. This time I said some choice words and solved the issue.
After booting instead of the desktop appearing you get a shell login. Well yes you can still use the thing, but it's not as funMy first thought was something was up w/ x11.... not the case. What ended up working for me was to issue the command apt-get install gdm3 . That gave me back my desktop. Now for some odd reason the first time this issue happened I lost all network capabilities, this time I still had some functionality(had to beings I used aptitude!). Prior to the desktop taking a magic poof the networking client was acting very strange giving me odd icons telling me connections were not available, yet I was still connected. I updated, and upgraded, then death to desktop. As a precaution I went ahead and installed wicd after gdm3.
I hope this helps someone, and thank you for letting me share my experience.