Comment 31 for bug 37288

As it happens I found a partial solution to this problem.

Because bluetooth did not work under Linux I booted Vista, turned on the bluetooth (using software), went about my bluetooth business and shut Vista down, without disabling it with the software. When I rebooted Ubuntu bluetooth-applet worked flawlessly.

However, this means there is a boolean value somewhere which the applet does not make use of. If ever it is set to false bluetooth will no longer work.