Comment 51 for bug 330811

My experience is pretty much the same as Sebaestn describes on the 2009-05-02 - with plasma-widget-network-manager-0.7+svn961724-0ubuntu1~ppa1, it works after an initial connection has been created by different workarounds.

This was tested with different boxes and different WiFi chipsets, after a clean install of the box on every event. On the Intel 2915ABG WiFi chipset the first connection was created by entering "sudo iwconfig eth1 essid 'SSID'". After a cupple of minuttes the connection was automatically created, and works on continuosly reboots.

On a Atheros 521x Chipset (internal as well as external PCMCIA cards) this didn't work at all, and the default jaunty driver ath5k seems to make things worse. Changed the driver from the "Hardware Drivers" application, rebooted and tried the iwconfig thing without luck. Unhidding the SSID on the AP for the initial connection, and hidding the SSID again, connection was established automatically on successive reboots.

Reinstalled the OS a cupple of times on the boxes, and the latest Kubuntu experimental build does make things better, but definitely doesn't solve the problem yet.
Finally I think that it would make sense if the bug importance was raised to a higher level upstream at KDE (comment #2 for this bug) and the ToDo.txt at KDE's SVN, where the bug isn't mentioned at all.