I think I can shed some light on the subject. I have a machine that was updated yesterday from hardy to intrepid (i386). After the update I was seeing the same symptoms as described above (no nm-applet icon in the notification area, though Networkmanager and nm-applet were running, nothing in /var/crash).
I ignored the problem for a while though had a look into my /var/log/syslog for other reasons and noted a message about the driver for my wlan stick (rt73usb) not being able to find the firmware. After installing the linux-firmware package and rebooting the nm-applet appeared as usual. Apparently there is a missing dependency that leads to the linux- firmware package getting dropped during the update? At least in appears that the resulting faulty behaviour though seems to lead to the weird behaviour of nm-applet. I'm attaching the relevant part from the machine's syslog... Regs, Stephan ** Attachment added: "syslog-excerpt.txt" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/18794024/syslog-excerpt.txt -- Network Manager fails to start https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/282835 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs