>> Could it be a symptom of the kdesudo / kdesu problems?

I posted last year a kdesu problem with X apps as root..I don't know
how to link back there. I don't and won't use sudo in a debian
installation. There was not much response, I can only assume everybody
else here uses sudo.

My fix was to purge kdesudo-trinity, then change relevant menu entries to:

kdesu --nonewdcop (root app)

and make sure "run as a different user" is unchecked.

Ceni is not affected if called from a root terminal, it's ncurses
based. For me that is the easiest method for first-off network config.
After that I use wpa_gui to setup multiple wireless networks.