N/W manager applet disappears

[H.S.Rai]

NetworkManager Applet 0.8.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
disappears when wifi is not available. Some times "sudo service
network-manager restart" bring it back, but mostly it does not. In
this way I am not able to connect through my datacard.

Is there any way to keep N/W manager applet in panel (it used to be
there earlier), whether some wifi connection is there or not.

How to connect to a particular wifi connection / lan or ppp through
some command or script, as I found commands are more reliable than
GUI.

-- 
H.S.Rai