[ Forwarded from http://bugs.debian.org/436125 ]

manphiz <manphiz@gmail.com> reported this bug and wrote a patch to fix it;

"gnome-netstatus-applet currently fails to update its statistics after
disconnection and reconnection. An investigation within the source
revealed it was because the status determination between current and
previous state is based on "packets" field, which, according to an
investigation in /proc/net/dev, will be reset to 0 after reconnection,
which in turn resulted in the status will be determined as "Idle" until
the new "packets" data is larger than the previously saved one. Whilst
the "bytes" field won't be reset to 0 and will continue to accumulate.
Changing the comparison criterion to bytes-based eliminates this glitch.
The patch is attached below."