Comment 61 for bug 339313

Turns out, here in Karmic I've had the same problem in both the plasmoid and knetworkmanager. It continually attempts to connect over and over to no avail. I rather liked the plasmoid, but to fix the problem (as someone else suggested) I did "sudo apt-get install wicd", then gave it a reboot.

For those of you unfamilar with wicd, right click on the new icon you have in the tray and click connect. Find your network on the list and click the ">" to bring up more options. Click advanced settings and add type WPA (or whatever enc you are using) key in the box at the bottom. Click OK then click Connect. You should be good to go.

On a personal note, I am disappointed that I had to resort to this option, however, I am grateful that I had a (simple) second option. Having no nifty plasmoid is better than no wifi at all, my wife is rather tired of seeing my 50ft bright orange cat5 laying about in the living room. :/