Comment 41 for bug 912702

Same problem here (Mint 14), whenever a secured connection has a weak signal. Of course, the immediate way to avoid waking up to a computer slowed down by hundreds of dialogs is to disable wireless overnight when in the presence of such a network, but that's not a good fix overall.

I agree that if the login information is missing or incorrect then Mathieu's fix is the right thing--just stop trying to connect until the user supplies new information. But in most cases where I have come across this bug the login information is already correct, and the issue is instead (as far as I can tell) that the signal isn't good enough to get it across reliably. In such a case it is preferable to just try again without consulting the user to verify the password.

Perhaps if it is hard to implement the "at most one dialog" approach, you could instead add a "don't ask me to authenticate for this network again" flag in the dialog? Ideally, this would turn just the relevant network from Mathieu's behavior (always ask and wait for authentication) to the bad signal behavior (always retry without asking). Of course, there should be a similar flag in the connection preferences (perhaps near "connect automatically") where this option could be unset.