What has happened to networking?

I have updated Slackware (32 bit version) to its bleeding end, and now I have a problem with networking.
Ping three days ago always returned times around 7 ms to ping 8.8.8.8.
Now the times have greatly changed and is trashing download speeds.
Here is what I see:

ping: socket: Address family not supported by protocol
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=41.9 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=44.8 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=40.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=114 time=47.3 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=114 time=38.3 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6 ttl=114 time=44.5 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=7 ttl=114 time=35.7 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=8 ttl=114 time=38.0 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 8 received, 0% packet loss, time 7011ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 35.678/41.338/47.335/3.749 ms

I never used to get the first statement about the socket error.

Seems other linux distros may have the same problem, but it really is limiting my download speeds.