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.

Linux Mint user not listed on logon prompt

I tried adding a few accounts to a linux mint laptop for my kids. When using the GUI users tool, it ended up hanging when trying to create the accounts, so I went back to the normal command line tools for user creation. The accounts were created and were able to logon, by hitting esc to get a username prompt at the gui logon. When trying to find a solution for this, most people point to the UID value needing to be over 1000. The accounts that I created were 1002 and 1003, so no luck with that solution. This setting is in /etc/mdm/mdm.conf, in the [greeter] section, MinimalUID=1000. After digging around and looking at the working accounts, I noticed the command line tools missed some of the user details in /etc/passwd. Column #5 (user ID info was missing) and shell was left blank. For the working users, column #5 had the username and 3 comma's after it. After adding this to /etc/passwd, all accounts were listed as they should be.

Non-functional entry:
testuser:x:1002:1002::/home/testuser:

Functional Entry:
testuser:x:1002:1002:testuser,,,:/home/testuser:/bin/bash