Comment 13 for bug 259278

As I understand it, Knetworkmanager sends a signal to the NM daemon to connect. The NM daemon sends back status messages, and Knetworkmanager updates the icon to reflect these.

What seems to be happening, is nm-applet sends the message to connect, which Knetworkmanager cannot do, but Knetworkmanager is still able to get the status updates back and update its icon. So it is really just reporting back on what nm-applet ordered.