Comment 1 for bug 861860

I'm also testing the interplay of wicd 1.7.1~b3 and dhcpcd 5.2.12 right now (on Debian sid). I can reproduce your problems if either
- the global dhcpcd is running after for example "$ /etc/init.d/dhcpcd start" (which does not seem to be the case in your setup)
or
- I explicitly set "background" in my dhcpcd.conf (or dhcpcd somehow gets invoked with the "-b" option).
In both cases the problem is that when wicd invokes dhcpcd, the dhcpcd process immediately goes to the background while apparently wicd expects it to only go in the background after the lease has been successfully obtained.

Have you set "background" in your dhcpcd.conf? Maybe you could also try to explicitly set "waitip" in your dhcpcd.conf. If you run wicd in debug mode (which can be enabled through wicd-curses and the like) you will also see the command that wicd uses to invoke dhcpcd. Maybe through some black magic a "-b" has found its way into the options of dhcpcd?