As soon as I wrote "save" and thought about it in the context of 'state(s)' I thought about Gnome session management and turned my attention to the desktop file for nm-applet (nm-applet.desktop), specifically the command line, which specifies 'nm-applet --sm-disable'. After removing the '--sm-disable' option, which effect 'man gnome-options' tells us is to 'Disable connection to session manager.', nm-applet starts up at login time without 'Enable Wireless', which was the setting I had just before a logging out (and then logging back in).
Now I will try a full reboot and see how this interacts with the Network Manager daemon. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org