Firstly, I've been running Slackware 9.1 through 13.37 and until tonight, never gave this much thought but I've gotten myself confused over a couple of things.

I'm running 13.37 64 on a laptop and remeber obtaining wicd from the /extra folder so that I could connect to wifi when needed, this works and I've never really given it any more thought but...

I've alos got 14 64 on a pc and been noticing that the small NM icon on the panel is showing "No Network Interfaces" and subsequently SYSTEM SETTINGS-NETWORK SETTINGS (in KDE) is greyed out, nothing under the "wired" option. This is the case on both my laptop and my pc in front of me.
However if I enable/start /etc/rc.networkmanager the icon on the panel changes and SYSTEM SETTINGS-NETWORK SETTINGS (in KDE) shows some info about the eth0 under the wired tab.
Small note, even though this now shows as connected, it also says Network Manager is not running, as can be seen in this image:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jt2x3qwoes...415_201816.jpg
Is this just a bug to further confuse me?

So to my question(s) I guess.
What is the purpose of Network Manager and wicd? Simply to allow easy/graphical network changes, ie connect to wifi?

I've pretty much always got by with netconfig and forgotten about it until I needed to use the wireless connection on my laptop ofc.

Sorry for the above wall of text.

Just run 'netconfig' again and, when asked, choose 'Network Manager'

After that, the Network Manager widget should show. If not, just run 'nm-applet' as a regular user.

Left-click on the widget to choose you connection, right-click if you want to change some setting (usually not necessary).

Network Manager can mange both wired and wireless connection and in some cases automatically switch between them if need be, so it's pretty handy IMO.

So really, Network Manager and wicd are just two different flavours of the same juice?
And in reality, seeing as /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 start/stop starts and stops the network, both Network Manager and wicd are just fancy frontends?

Somehow.

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If you travel between many wifi AP with authentication, it's faster to set it up once and connect automatically via pre-configured network profiles with either wicd or NetworkManager. Also NetworkManager's applet is nice frontend to openVPN (wicd still lacks openVPN support).