Waiting 60 more seconds for network configuration and no network-manager after login

[repsah]

After recently upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 14.10 I am experiencing a problem at startup: the infamous "waiting 60 more seconds for network configuration".
After a couple of minutes the system finally completes booting, but I have no network manager.

I either need to restart it manually or I need to emit manually the network-static-up (after that is emitted network-manager starts just fine).

my /etc/network/interfaces is configured correctly:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Any idea? What else can I do to investigate this problem?

[repsah (repsah)]

Just to add (seen from other reports)

# ls -l /run/network
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 20 22:55 ifstate
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mar 20 22:57 ifup.wlan0