Is networkmanager to use only with dhcp connections?

[Michelasso <qzerty gmail com>]

I have installed network-manager and knetworkmanager applet in a
laptop running kubuntu edgy, since I needed a network switching tool
to use when I am at home and at university, where I use different
network settings. But I couldn't get it to work as I would like. Let's
consider only the wired connection, to keep things simple. As long I
have dhcp enabled in my dsl router (what I don't want), everything is
fine, (k)networkmanager connects to it and gets the address.
But if I disable dhcp, then (k)networkmanager gets stuck: it tries to
connect to the router for a while, and after that it brings up eth0
with ip address 169.254.141.132, that really does not make sense in my
case, since the ip address of my router is 192.168.1.1
I would like to have 192.168.1.3 as fixed ip address for my ethernet
card, but I couldn't find any way to obtain it through
(k)networkmanager.

So what?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is (k)networkmanager supposed to work only with dhcp?
Is this a only kde-related issue and in Gnome everything works?

Thanks for any help