Comment 30 for bug 284162

I'm experiencing the exact same problem as described by GonzO in comment #14. This started to happen on my system after the upgrade from Karmic to Lucid. I can't remember ever having experienced this on Karmic, but the problem now occurs on almost every boot.

The icon is there, but will either be invisible (you only see a pixel or two) or it appears as another icon (in my case as the volume icon that's sitting right next to it). After removing and re-adding the notification area, the network applet is shown as expected.