no network after sleep on squeeze with gnome

[Richard Otte <bahboric@gmail.com>]

I had a minimal Lenny system that I upgraded to Squeeze and installed
Gnome Desktop on.  I never used the sleep function before, but set it to
 go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity.  After awakening from sleep
I find I no longer have a network connection, but can get it back by typing:
/etc/init.d/networking stop; /etc/init.d/networking start
This is a desktop machine connected to my router by an ethernet cable,
and the /etc/network/interfaces has:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 172.16.1.1
        netmask 255.255.0.0
        gateway 172.16.0.1

I do not have network manager installed.  I did not see any bugs in
gnome-power-manager that seemed relevant to this (but I could be wrong).

Any suggestions of what to try next?

Thanks,
Ric