Thirdly, as far as I can see NetworkManager
tries to make my WiFi card (a bog-standard Orinico Gold PCMCIA card)
perform operations that it is not capable of,
causing my laptop to hang.
Have you tried the cvs version of the drivers from:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/orinoco/
I had similar problems with lockups etc. and the upstream drivers
fixed the issue for me,
Fourthly, as you mention it is not clear what relation
NetworkManager has to NetworkManagerInfo.
On my laptop the latter program sometimes starts the little windmill icon,
and sometimes does not,
It works for me 99% of the time right now, not bad for a
bleeding edge
feature IMHO.
<snip>
A working network wizard would be a great addition to Linux.
Sadly NetworkManager does not currently fulfil that role.
Again it 'just
works' for me, just have to compile the upstream
drivers when I uprade kernel.
Hopefully some of the upstream functionality will make its way
downstream in the not so distant future.
Bests
JS