Comment 5 for bug 784330

I believe this is related to either a screen saver or the screen blanking process. I say this because it's almost 100% now that when I leave my system alone to go to work, when I get home (10 hrs), the VPN menu is just a tiny, unmanly, nub.

My semi-educated guess is that the VPN menu is an applet/plug-in of sorts which isn't listening for/subscribed to/getting the "wake-up and re-build" event/hook. But, I have no idea about the internals of Gnome so take it with a grain of salt.