Something wrong with the KDE wireless interface?

[Marko Vojinovic]

Since a couple of updates and weeks ago (F14, don't remember exactly when, 
sorry) the KDE wireless applet stopped doing its work.

When I click on it and choose to connect to my wireless router, it asks for a 
passphrase (WPA), and then hangs in "waiting for authorization" state forever, 
without connecting.

After some troubleshooting, I figured I can use the nm-applet from Gnome, after 
I disable a couple of services in the KDE service manager (namely, the 
"NetworkManager User Setting Service" and "Network Status"). If I don't 
disable them, nm-applet fails to run, saying another instance is already 
running (which is wrong, btw). I suspect one of these services are simulating 
the presence of nm-applet to prevent it from running concurrently.

Anyway, when the services are disabled, nm-applet is running and connects to 
my router without any problems.

The issue is that this is a workaround, and that default KDE configuration used 
to work flawlessly until some point.

I also tried to connect to other wireless networks (open, wep, wpa...) to 
check if it's something related to my router, but the symptoms are the same 
everywhere.

Is this a known issue? Am I the only one seeing it? How can I troubleshoot it? 
I was monitoring /var/log/messages while trying to connect, but nothing there 
points to the problem, AFAICT.

Btw, when nm-applet is running, the KDE applet in the taskbar correctly 
reports the state of the wireless interface, and appears to coexist nicely 
with nm-applet.

From what I understand, the NetworkManager service is running correctly, nm-
applet is also running correctly, but something within KDE went to lunch...

Any ideas?

TIA, :-)
Marko