Network manager not enabled on Kubuntu 10.04

For some unknown reason, kubuntu network manager caked on me, the way to restore it is to do the following:

sudo service network-manager stop
cd /var/lib/NetworkManager/
sudo rm NetworkManager.state
sudo service network-manager start

After these commands, the network manager was back on. Now why would this be needed? This is the one thing that really gets me to think that Windows might be bloated but it always kind of “works”