Linux mint (KDE) network manager inactive

One of my lab vmware vm's running mint 18.2 KDE version recently lost all network connectivity.  Usually I suspend the machine everytime I'm powering off the host to keep all my applications and tools in the same state that I left this.  This time when restoring it, it went through a normal OS bootup.  After logging in, the network manager tray icon was showing no connections and a status of Inactive, with the tray icon colored red.  Checking the dmesg log, it showed an ens## device being renamed to eth0 with the correct driver.  "lshw -C network" showed  the device in a disabled state.  lsmod showed everything loaded.  Trying to create new virtual nic's didn't do anything.  I changed the vmx file to use vmxnet3 instead of e1000, changed grub to not use all these ens## device id's for the network card and a few other possible fixes for udev and other stuff, but nothing worked.  Eventually I stumbled on a post that suggested looking at /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state.  The option NetworkingEnabled was set to false.  I edited that true, restarted network-manager service and everything came back to life.  I suspect there were some patches and probably kernel updates between my last suspend of the vm and this boot up, so perhaps that triggered something in the OS.  Either way it was several hours wasted.