Comment 2 for bug 205887

I can confirm this (or a similar issue) on a Thinkpad T41 with Atheros built-in WLAN for Hardy a6 and Xubuntu-Hardy beta live CD. This is a regression from Gutsy. I run a WLAN with a 128bit WEP key. Setup under Gutsy from nm-applet worked perfectly by just entering the passphrase as it was entered into the AP for key generation.

Behaviour under Hardy beta is that nm-applet sees the Network and asks for the key. It then stalls with both blobs gray, indicating "Waiting for passphrase". Eventually, it will ask again, to no avail.

When configuring this as suggested above (iwconfig/dhclient), things get seriously weird. I can set a key with iwconfig. This key, however, will seemingly randomly "degrade" to either another key (but always the same other key), or later even to "off". I made sure I killed nm-applet and made sure no obvious offender process runs. I renamed "iwconfig" to "iwconfig2" to make sure no other process tries to access it and put a logger in place of "iwconfig". The logger is not invoked, but the problem persists.

With a small likelyhood (about 30% of tries), an "dhclient ath0" following the iwconfig will succeed. Once that has happened, the WLAN connection stays reliable.

I save you the logs for now, because the essence is: do iwconfig, then check interfaces three times to watch three different key settings (proper key, wrong key, "off") in the worst case.