I just upgraded to the sid repos and installed on the upgrades. all of the software is upgraded to newer version and a new kernel was installed. everything is working out great. the only thing that seems to have gone bad is the network manager. after i updated everything and restarted the computer the network manager is now showing up as a red circle with a white horizontal line on it. what does this mean. is it a bad thing if so what do i have to do to fix it

It may be that network manager is not managing the interface for whatever reason, have a look at the wiki page first:

http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager

do you think that it was even a wise decision to switch the repos to sid because now everything has gone screwy, i don't know why

well i guess instead of updating the kernel i'll do it through the tarballs on the kernel.org site and best of all it will customized. and when it fails on e when using it with the new kernel i can always uninstall it and resume using the 2.6 kernel, maybe upgrading isn't always necessary

It depends on what you want to do... you will have to expand a bit more on the "everything has gone screwy" if you want to get any help with this.

Sid is the unstable distribution, you should only upgrade to unstable if you know what you're doing. It's best to run testing for a while, or mixed testing/unstable, first. There are bugs in sid and things do break.

If you simply want newer packages or a newer kernel then you can stick with squeeze and backport those newer packages yourself and/or add the backports repo and get a newer kernel from there. There are 2.6.38 or .39 kernels available in backports which should be worth a try.

http://backports-master.debian.org/Instructions/

If you want to build your own kernel this is a very good howto: http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=101

To backport / build debian packages from source: http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=127