Comment 4 for bug 529834

Well, I've just discovered that there are actually a couple parts of the UI that have this bug. The most major one from a usability standpoint is when a user first connects to a new WPA wireless network and gets the window asking for different network parameters. This is what I posted in the screenshot above. This part I can't test in Lucid right now, as I only have a virtual image available and it virtualizes my wireless connection as a wired one.

But you can get that in Karmic if you try to log onto a new WPA wireless network. (I haven't tested other types of networks, but it probably exhibits the same behavior in every type of network where a CA certificate would need to be specified by the user.) If you don't have access to a new WPA wireless network, you can make network-manager forget about a previously used network by right clicking -> Edit Connections -> Wireless -> Delete. That way you can then try to connect and nm-applet should give you the window I posted above (assuming the UI hasn't changed in Lucid).

There are other parts of the nm-applet UI that exhibit this behavior though, namely every place where the user needs to select a CA certificate file. I can confirm on both Karmic and Lucid that the Edit Connections UI exhibits this behavior (right click on the network-manager applet, select Edit Connections -> Wireless -> Add -> Wireless Security -> WPA & WPA2 Enterprise (Dynamic WEP also works) -> CA certificate). Editing an existing connection likewise also suffers this problem.

This should be a one line fix for each of the UI elements, namely just call gtk_file_chooser_set_current_folder(GTK_FILE_CHOOSER (button), "/etc/ssl/certs");
on each relevant GtkFileChooserButtons, although I must warn I'm no Gtk+ expert and haven't looked at the nm-applet code that much.