wireless-indicator disappeared during upgrade

[themusicgod1]

Upon upgrading from 16.04 (xenial) to 16.10 (yakkety), at some point (it was difficult to tell at what point, since due to another bug with the system fonts(?) the system fonts were unreadable blocks. That issue went away), after the packages were mostly installed, the wireless network indicator in gnome disappeared, and my connection to the internet was lost. Attempting to get a connection via wicd-curses resulted in -

ERROR:connection_factory_impl.cc(369) Failed to connect to MCS endpoint with error -137 errors when an attempt was made to get an IP address.

Network connection: wlan0

           *-network
                description: Wireless interface
                product: QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter
                vendor: Qualcomm Atheros
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:0e:00.0
                logical name: wlan1
                version: 01
                serial: 28:e3:47:f1:aa:55
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical wireless
                configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=4.8.0-22-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.250.9 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
                resources: irq:17 memory:d3500000-d357ffff memory:d3580000-d358ffff

Occasionally before the upgrade, this system would lose the ability to connect to wireless and it would fail at the 'getting an ip address' step of connecting in wicd-curses (and would time out if an attempt was made to connect via gnome's wireless settings), but in this case the wireless network indicator itself went away, as if there was no wireless installed at all.

Rebooting system post-install -> worked just fine, wireless indicator was there upon login again as usual.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:16.10.6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-22.24-generic 4.8.0
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Sun Oct 16 14:22:15 2016
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-07-09 (829 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" - Alpha amd64 (20140708)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to yakkety on 2016-10-16 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog: