OK, over the past day or so, some foggy memories have returned of having been here before. Last year, I installed Knoppix 6.7.1 on a Compaq Deskpro (Pentium II), after having Knoppix 6.7.0 installed on it, and I ran into the exact same problem. After spending too much time trying (unsuccessfully) to get the nm-applet problem sorted, I re-installed 6.7.0, which worked great, proving the problem to not be an i586 issue. Last night, I installed 6.7.0 on the Aptiva, and Voila!!!, the nm-applet problem was gone. It's NOT an i586 issue.

Now, with Knoppix 6.7.0 running great on the Aptiva, I have a different problem. I tried to install Samba, and had problem with dependencies. If there's a quick answer to this, here's the message that Synaptic returned:

samba:
Depends: samba-common (=2:3.5.6~dfsg-3squeeze7) but 2:3.5.8~dfsg-1 is to be installed
Depends: libwbclient0 (=2:3.5.6~dfsg-3squeeze7) but 2:3.5.8~dfsg-1 is to be installed

Otherwise, it's the topic of a different thread.

Werner - Thanks for trying to help..