I usually condemn bashing a community, but the Ubuntu community is pretty much my only exception. $10 says there was probably an upstream fix, or quite possibly the bug stemmed from the way Ubuntu implemented NetworkManager - because they are known for having a bad implementation of NM just like they're known for their HORRID implementation of PulseAudio (not that even a good implementation of PA is particularly good).
Half the problem with Ubuntu is a whole is that the community are merely "fans", not the heart and soul of the project ala Debian, Arch and even Fedora despite being largely made up of RH employees. Community input and steering are almost non-existent. If the community was properly integrated then the community could have quick turn-around on fixing problems. At the moment, the only reasonable way to get fixes in is to go to the upstream projects and *hope* Ubuntu pulls down your code in a reasonable time-frame (if at all) - because working with upstream is a foreign concept in the Ubuntu work-flow. The cabal of Ubuntu devs short-cut sanity and apply patches downstream. The concept of working with upstream is so foreign in-fact that the use of PPAs is common place.. This behaviour is completely broken because it is not user friendly, it is not friendly to the wider open source community, it is not good for security and it is possibly leading users down the road of having data that or practices that are incompatible with any other fork of the software.
BTW, did you even try WICD as an alternative to NetworkManager? It would work around any NM specific problems and provide a far cleaner solution. In short you probably provided the classing "poor hackjob solution" I was referring to.
You should probably find the outdated and inaccurate documentation/forum post on how to install a spell checker. Have fun.