Comment 3 for bug 999744

Confirmed this bug, but with a weird qualification:

With a default install of Xubuntu 12.04 I ran into this problem consistently (i.e. I never saw either applet populate data), regardless of wired/wireless connectivity, and across many system restarts and docky restarts.

For unrelated reasons, I uninstalled the network-manager package and replaced it with wicd. The applets now work flawlessly. I don't know enough about how Docky determines connectivity to say whether this is its problem or network-manager's, but I have now confirmed that making this switch fixes the problem on multiple machines.