I've observed this behaviour in both Linux Mint 15 and 16 Cinnamon on the same machine. When I use service to stop networking, like so
sudo service networking stop or restart
it's like the GUI becomes more "basic." I'm new to Linux, so forgive my ignorance, but it seems like there's another window manager on top of a more barebones one, and for some reason that process is stopped when I stop networking.
I can restart or stop network-manager without any GUI changes, and it results in my networking being reset or stopped. Why can't I mess with networking?