Comment 3 for bug 1010745

It's an even more general issue I think. The problem is, whenever anything goes wrong in the connection process, nm-applet asks the user for a password. It makes no difference, whether the wifi went down completely, the dhcp server didn't respond or anything else happened. Most of the times, it totally makes no sense, to ask the user for a new password. A clear error message with the reason for the connection problem, or the possibility to provide manual network configuration e.g. if dhcp fails, would be much better.

I'm travelling a lot and use new wifis nearly every day. Lots of them are badly maintained hotel or restaurant wifis. Given correct credentials, most connection problems are cause by bad connectivity, someone switching of the wifi unexpectedly, or by problems with the DHCP server on the router. While of course nothing helps against the first, just setting the IP address manually to something like 192.168.1.... sometimes does the job. So if there would be some proper exception handling for the connection process, a menu to enter configuration settings manually could be provided, or some configurations could be tried out automatically, even if DHCP setup fails.

And for bad connectivity or network shutdowns, this could be handled by retries with increased timeout and clear error messages, finally switching to other networks if available, without disturbing the user with a password dialogue. For the inexperienced user this is just totally misleading and keeps him retrying, while there is no hope for cure for the connection at all.