The reason I am using wicd is because I had no luck with NetworkManager getting to connect to wireless networks protected by wpa. During my research I have found that when running wpa_supplicant interactively (i.e. specifying -d and removing -B flag) it is able to connect to the network. I traced the problem to some timing issue between wpa_supplicant and the wifi card driver. The relevant thing is that if wpa_supplicant gets run with a low nice value (I'm using -19), it just works. This got me to changing /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/wicd/wnettools.py line 856.
It would be nice if there would be an (advanced) option that describes how to launch these tools, or at least to be able to specify extra options (like -d) to them.
Wicd 1.5.6
Ubuntu 8.10
Targeting for Wicd 2.0 (aqua).