NM probs under Fedora 10

[egc <forum query gmail com>]

Greetings -

With EOL for Fedora 8 (which I have running on a number of machines),
I decided to take one of them and try a clean install of the latest
and greatest from Fedora (10 - Cambridge). After some fiddling, I got
network up and running (standard RealTek NIC, fixed ip...), but
something isn't letting NM play nice with my system. By default, I
didn't install NM at all. However, if I grab it and the dependencies
from yum repos, install it,  I immediately lose networking, even
though I didn't tell the system to use NM to manage anything!

I can confirm that its something related to NM since as soon as I
uninstall it (and related dependencies), networking pops right back
on.

I'm not entirely new to GNU/Linux, but  usually don't fuss with
networking much, since it generally works. However, I am somewhat
concerned by the behaviour I just described above. Could someone more
learned about NM (and that is most folks, at this point) give me some
guidance about what to look for/check?

Thanks very much in advance...apologies if this is below the usual
level of discussion, but this is my first issue concerning NM.