NetworkManager?

[rac-7q86n6wRh+gPnHn3N7+5xA at public.gmane.org (Richard Chonak)]

I've been installing kubuntu on a laptop this week, and found 
KNetworkManager not helpful for my wireless setup. It could enable and 
disable the wired network connection successfully, but could not 
successfully configure and start a WPA-PSK connection.

I replaced it with the utility "wicd", which has worked very well. 
wicd has two components: a server that is launched by an /etc/init.d/ 
script, and a client that need only be run when you want to change the 
configuration.  Information is at http://wicd.net/ .  Nicely enough, the 
  prebuilt ubuntu package for this utility automatically uninstalls 
KNetworkManager.

--RC