First, my wifi hardware and associated linux kernel stuff is working fine. When I boot into rescue mode, wifi always is working.
The problem starts when I either boot into the gnome3 gui or exit rescue mode and continue on to the gnome3 gui. At that point two things, which I assume are correlated, are present: airplane mode is on and my wifi is not working.
To get wifi working I have to turn off airplane mode and then do some number of ifdown/ifup wlan0 before wifi starts working. I also seem to have to delete /run/wpa* stuff too.
I'm running jessie with the latest updates. (I'm not supplying hardware info since it's working.)
I've uninstalled the network-manager package and configure my pci wireless adapter via /etc/network/interfaces.d/*. As I said, this all works. What I'm trying to do is to get gnome3 from messing it up. Thanks for any tips.# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 8.9 (jessie)
Release: 8.9
Codename: jessie
By the way, this problem isn't present in stretch and wasn't present in jessie initially. It was introduced, I think, in some update to jessie.