If BT is off it comes on if you start a program that uses it. So, there should be no support calls from those users because they had BT turned off. The problem is things like BT keyboards where you need to turn BT on first.
There are a couple of valid problems with leaving BT on permanently:
- As far as I have been able to tell, in an unscientific way, leaving it on seems to drain the battery slightly more. Not much, but measurable.
- Some users will want to keep the BT visible as default, and just switch BT off when not using it. If BT were permanently on then it would be visible all the time, which is not always what you want, and you would have to go in and reconfigure it whenever you wanted to receive a file, for example. Much much easier to just turn it on and off, it it wasn't for the fact that the current BT icon disappears.

This is one of those cases where the designers tried to be too smart for their own good.

@joker - no flames from here matey. if someone can show me that it doesn't use more power in idle then I'm all for leaving BT turned on if not connected.

But like you I am a control freak, and because I don't use either my keyboard or gps all the time would just like to be able to easily turn it on and off.

My laptop had a hardware switch - overkill but that script should solve it. Now just for an icon.

Bluetooth is a problem in the US Army. Not allowed to be on in any building where I work, and occasionally they "sniff" for it to tell people to turn off their BT devices. We can have it, just not turned on inside.
And we are required to use "hands free" devices for cell phones while driving on post, so BT is very popular.

TA-t3, Not all programs that need BT will turn it on. My Navicore doesn't. When I select "Activate GPS" from the menu, it won't turn on BT to find my GPS. I have to do that manually. I wish the BT icon were persistent, whether or not BT was actually on (different icon for off vs. on), with the ability to turn BT on from the icon's menu, just the way you can turn it off from the icon's menu.

Yep, the only sensible thing is to get that BT icon persistent. Hopefully someone at Nokia listens, or maybe we'll just have to dig out the means to replace it ourselves.

I'm going to add those sudo commands in my status-bar cpu-load applet thingy. (Sorry, can't remember what it's called.)
That's probably the easiest way to run them.
Many thanks!

Done..

I have created a shell script to launch 'sudo hciconfig hci0 up'. This will installed in the menu, and so can be launched with 2 clicks!

I have uploaded the deb file in switchOnBT Home Page

switchOnBT 1.0
A simple script to start bluetooth.
It will add a line to /etc/sudoers
user ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/hciconfig hci0 up'

This works a treat. Instant promotion to the realms of useful people for that man.

karma[vabgeo]++

vabgeo you are a beautiful person! By selecting your script in my simplelauncher applet I can now turn on bluetooth with one tap. That's twice as fast as I can turn it off!
One question: I have the icons in simplelauncher set to "extra-large", yet the bluetooth icon is still very tiny. Is there any way to change this?