FWIW I've been running Alphas of Maverick on an SD card (Eeepc 901) for the last month or so with great success connecting to two different WPA routers that I never got running on Lucid. Note that I have a Karmic partition that still works great as a backup, but you might want to just consider jumping ahead to Maverick to fix the problem. You could always try a LiveCD on a flash drive first to see if it would work for you.
FWIW I've been running Alphas of Maverick on an SD card (Eeepc 901) for the last month or so with great success connecting to two different WPA routers that I never got running on Lucid. Note that I have a Karmic partition that still works great as a backup, but you might want to just consider jumping ahead to Maverick to fix the problem. You could always try a LiveCD on a flash drive first to see if it would work for you.