For a long time I've found NetworkManager a pain to use and configure, so have been using wicd instead. I have found it mostly very intuitive and convenient, allowing useful defaults. And the graphical interface can be launched by a shell command (wicd-client -n) or from a Ctwm menu, etc. This requires disabling NM which can cause problems because some other things (wrongly) assume that NM is always used to manage network connections.
Anyhow having recently upgraded my dell laptop to Fedora 17 (to get round problems in hibernate/resume) I thought I would try NM. It seems to work OK when I run openbox with lxpanel (though with fewer options than wicd). But I have not found a way to launch the applet (nm-applet) while running ctwm, except by launching lxpanel (which I would not otherwise use as it takes up memory and cpu time, mostly duplicating functionality I aleady get from ctwm). While running lxpanel with ctwm I can click on the network icon included, and access NM. But I can't see why I can't just invoke 'nm-applet' in a ctwm menu option. I have done some searching on the internet, but probably have not phrased the question correctly. Thanks. Aaron http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs