Usually, I can use the applet in the upper part of the screen to connect to a wireless network. This is the applet for the Network Manager in GNOME. In the above picture the access point labeled "dlink" can be seen. Recently, this useful little applet had completely disappeared.
As embarrassing as this is, it took me several days and many pointless searches until I finally stumbled on a fix:
ps aux|grep nm-applet
I then ran kill -9 on that pid and then issued the following command after hitting ALT-F2.
nm-applet --sm-disable
Fixed! The little applet had been restored to my notification area. Yay! I still have no idea what the --sm-disable option is. I also don't know if it's a problem to have multiple users logged in or if that was the actual cause of the problem.
This had recently disappeared from my login leaving me only with my battery status, bluetooth applet, sound control and such. Logging into another account on my computer, the applet would show up properly; I thought this might be a user account issue or some problem with my gconf preferences, though I no longer believe this to be true.
This was never a big deal since Ubuntu automatically connects to the open (unprotected) Wi-Fi network in my neighbor's house so it's only been more of a nuisance than anything else.
The fun part of this little adventure occurred when I was finally motivated enough to find a fix. While at a friend's house recently and being unable to use the applet (either in my own login where it had disappeared or in the other user account, a guest account, where it did show up but would seem to be unresponsive, even after a reboot) to connect to his Wi-Fi, I had to tether my Droid to my laptop in order to search the web until I found the right command to invoke the Network Manager applet. I had only just recently followed instructions on setting up the tethered link to my phone. (Thank you, Shannon!)
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