NetworkManager Regression in Gutsy?

After using Gutsy for another week, I have to say I am very disappointed with NetworkManagers performance. The sudden sieze-up I earlier attributed to being post-suspend has showed itself as being much worse then that. It seems random to me now. I move between access points a lot at the office and at least once a day over the last week, nm has suddenly stopped working. The network list will stop updating and picking another network will not do anything. Sometimes I can fix this by killing and restarting both nm-applet and NetworkManager (which, who names an executable like that anyways?), but other times it seems to be completely gone and I'm left using my trusty connect scripts.

I suspect that this could have something to do with ndiswrapper, so I am going to switch back to the (last time I checked) buggy bcm43xx for a while and see if the situation improves. I'm not confident that it will, however, as a co-worker is having the exact same symptoms without using ndiswrapper (I'm not sure what he's using though).

If nothing improves, then its goodbye, NetworkManager.

I've seen wicd recommended on the forums a lot so maybe I will give that a try. I also used to use wifi-radar a couple of releases ago, but had to run it as root, so that was no fun. Neither of those look as slick as Network Manager's supposed to be, anyways.

Its really too bad an application thats so essential to the usefulness of the OS is so buggy. Checking the Gutsy dev thread, it looks like my co-worker and I are not alone with out network manager gripes. I guess the fact that Gutsy's not a LTS release partially explains the lack of a resolution, but lets just hope version 0.7 makes it in to Hardy (and lives up to its promises).

Well, I was going to end this post there, but then I decided to head over to Launchpad and see if I could find my bug there. Surprisingly there were no bugs for Network Manager in the Ubuntu project, so I looked at the Network Manager project and couldn't find anything there either. Guess its bug submit time. I'll update here about how that goes.

edit: bug submitted

edit 2: evidently I'm just a big launchpad n00b, cause shortly after i posted my bug, i found a whole ton of network-manager in gutsy bugs. none of them match mine exactly yet, but many contain useful diagnostic tips. This link might get you the list, since I'm not sure how I got there...