Ubuntu – How to change the refresh rate at which the network manager updates the wireless access points

You can use cnetworkmanager for this.

Edit:

After some investigation it becomes clear that it is impossible to run two "user configuration providers" (an application listening at a certain dbus address) at the same time, and cnetworkmanager needs to act as such a "configuration provider" (at least until the connection is set up).

Now, what you can do is add the information for the connection to gconf under the /system/networking/connections key (you can do that from the commandline or a script), and then use dbus or a command-line tool like cnetworkmanager or nmcli to connect to it. Maybe you'll also have to add the key to the user's keyring first (to avoid password popups).

But of course that won't work on a desktop that uses another NM-client than nm-applet (e.g. KDE). You would have to figure out how to provide a config for them too...

Edit 2:

It seems like it might be possible via org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings on the system DBus, but this is all poorly documented IMO...

You might want to read about configuration settings and the DBus interface spec.

And here is a relevant example (maybe you want to set up a user connection instead of a system connection though)

Hm... not sure why NeworkManager behave this way. This should only happen if you have already added the wireless network in the list and Connect automatically is checked.... maybe is from a connection configured by another users and made available to all users.

You can try to manually add the wireless network and the uncheck Connect automatically.