In an earlier version of Kubuntu wicd worked great for wifi.
Under Kubuntu 11.04 is seems blocked. At a LUG meeting a couple non-KDE geeks suggested apparmor was blocking it. They were not familiar with apparmor.

I uninstalled wicd and wicd-kde, then rebooted and installed just wicd again, then rebooted and tested. I still can't connect. It says my wpa password is not good enough. With WinXP on same Samsung NC10 I can connect with wpa password with no problem.

Any fixes, workarounds or alternatives?
I am a practical guy so whatever works is what I want.

Over at kubuntuforums.net I found some advice that worked:
1) remove network-manager and related items using Kpackagekit
2) switch from WEP to WPA2
I needed to do both.