I have had it every since the 11.10 Unity release. It affects menus and non-Unity system tray icon menus also (like shutter, empathy, reminna). I believe it is actually a Unity/Compiz problem rather than Network Manager specific. It definitely does not require a suspend/restore to happen, just enough time/activity.
What happens is after a period of use, usually less that a day, some kind of resource appear to run out or have leaked itself out. Then various things that require the resources stop works; so dynamically- created menus tend to be the first victims. The Network Manager VPN menu is definitely once of the most crippling because I know no work-around. Certainly no amount of restarting NM etc, will help. Logging out and logging back in again will fix it for a few hours, then you'll be screwed again. I suspect, without any proof of knowledge, that the fault hits when you get close to needing to page or reclaim memory. I have 8GB and usually would be at ~7GB in used for applications/VM when it hits. That could just be coincidence though. I have given up expecting any of major Unity bugs to get fixed, so I just live with it until I get my next laptop, which of course will definitely not have Unity. Maybe Mint, or hell, Windows XP would be a step up at this stage :-) In the meantime, if anyone has any work-around that doesn't require a log-out I'd love to hear about it. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to network-manager-applet in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1019395 Title: At random times NM applet menu stops responding Status in “network-manager-applet” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: At random times, Network Manager's whole menu stops working. If I'm already connected (I mainly use wifi), then network keeps working fine, however none of the items in the menu does anything. Examples, I click on Edit Networks => nothing happens. I click on Disconnect => nothing happens I click on more networks => a tiny empty submenu is shown (instead of a list of available wifi networks, and there are plenty of them here) Rebooting fixes the issue. This is almost certainly a regression in a recent update, as I never experienced this until recently. This may be happening after suspend/resume, but I'm not sure. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04 Package: network-manager 0.9.4.0-0ubuntu4.1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-26.41-generic 3.2.19 Uname: Linux 3.2.0-26-generic i686 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu10 Architecture: i386 Date: Fri Jun 29 21:43:29 2012 IfupdownConfig: auto lo iface lo inet loopback InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429) IpRoute: default via 192.168.1.1 dev wlan0 proto static 169.254.0.0/16 dev wlan0 scope link metric 1000 192.168.1.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.1.67 metric 2 NetworkManager.state: [main] NetworkingEnabled=true WirelessEnabled=true WWANEnabled=true ProcEnviron: TERM=xterm PATH=(custom, user) LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: network-manager UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-05-17 (43 days ago) nmcli-dev: DEVICE TYPE STATE DBUS-PATH wlan0 802-11-wireless connected /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/1 eth0 802-3-ethernet unavailable /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/0 nmcli-nm: RUNNING VERSION STATE NET-ENABLED WIFI-HARDWARE WIFI WWAN-HARDWARE WWAN running 0.9.4.0 connected enabled enabled enabled enabled enabled To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-applet/+bug/1019395/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp