My networking drop down becomes unresponsive very often

Question

The networking tray item that lets me choose a network often stops being responsive. How can I reload or reintialize the menu without restarting? How can I fix it so it works more consistently?

Answer 1

You can restart the network icon and menu (known as network manager) by doing this in a terminal:

 killall nm-applet #use 'killall -9 nm-applet' if it is being stubborn
 nm-applet&
 disown

This will restart it. You can close the terminal without it going away.

The first command stops the already running instance. The second command manually starts it. The third command detaches it from your terminal so you can close the terminal.