Actually it's not fixed. It determines whether it's online by making a connection_status dbus call to wlancond. From what I can tell, this only returns whether there's a connection or not. So being in normal mode and not connected to an AP is indistinguishable from being in the offline mode. I don't believe there's a direct way of determining whether one is in offline mode (from dbus or gconf). Thanks for pointing out this problem.

Edit: Ok really fixed in latest update (v. 0.8-2). Now powerlaunch itself keeps track of the offline/normal state. It should be consistent now. The only difference is that when powerlaunch is initialized/reloaded, it forces it into normal mode regardless of the previous mode so that it knows what state it's in.