Well, this is wierd.
After my post, I ended up resetting my Poodle and after it booted up, everything was fine.
This makes me nervous. I don't know what it is that I did that caused this. I have been trying to get usb networking going and so had connected and disconnected the usb connection and connecting it to my ethernet connection. I'm finding that networking is not very robust. It doesn't seem to handle reconnects very gracefully.
Thanks for the replies. I hope this does not happen again!
radioz