I haven't observed that BT hasn't been working, but I've twice had a case where when I looked into the control panel I could see the BT name was empty and visibility was off (I don't think I actually tried BT at the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would be negatively affected by this). I then had a look into the actual configuration file (xterm+more) and everything was ok there. I don't know a way (yet) of restarting the applets, so I just rebooted to see what happened. The control panel showed BT as ok then (name and visibility). As I said, I've seen this twice. Must be some hickup in the control panel/BT applet or something.