Knetworkmanager not starting 9.10

[Nigel Ridley]

We have a Dell Vostro laptop running Kubuntu 9.10. There are several user accounts.
Sometimes Knetworkmanager will not start for an individual user and has to be started manually. I 
even added it to the 'System Settings > Advanced > Autostart' and it still refuses to start 
automatically. This is not the case for all users all the time. It did happen once to my wife's 
account but a log-out/log-in fixed it.

How do I get it to start as it should?

If I decide to use network-manager-gnome instead, how can I make sure that knetworkmanager stops 
loading - forever?

Blessings,

Nigel