recent updates now wireless almost unusable

It seems with today's updates, now it's almost impossible to connect to wireless. On login, the network manager widget just says 'waiting for authentication'. Which nothing seems to ask for, so it just sits. opening the plasma, clicking on the desired access point, I get many cycles of network manager crashing, and the panel apparently crashing and restarting. After randomly screwing around, eventually it somehow connects. I have not uploaded the crash dump as it's too large. So it looks like a whole bunch of bugs here. Why is it 'waiting for authentication'? This is not a new setup and has worked fine for years. Of course, NM shouldn't be crashing. But that seems to me to be yet another bug. It looks to me that nm crashed only after fiddling around, and after it already was hung with 'waiting for auth...'.