Is there any reason why you cannot use "network-manager" instead? It is much more integrated into the distribution than "wicd".

Without really investigating it myself, I suspect that the problem you are experiencing has to do with "wicd" using the same IP port number as the Maple kernel, so that the XMaple user interface frontend is not able to contact the maple kernel.

I'm using "network-manager" with the "network-manager-gnome" applet, and it's working great.