Thanks, oldhoghead. I have a usb wireless dongle that I used in my really old laptop. That should work OK then; I would have tried it earlier, but my desktop has had to use it since it temporarily had to move rooms. Thanks for all your help, and you too, dolphin_oracle!

Hi all,

Maybe I am wrong, this problem is the same I had before.
It concerns initiating a WPA (wpa_supplicant) connections via NDISwrapper.
There is something wrong in the handshaking between wpa_supplicant and the underlaying drivers.
The WiCD as also the Netword Manager strucle with this problem.
A workarround for this is a renice 19 to the wpa_suplicant process, so it processes it at a lower priority.
I know this is not a solution but a workarround, and don't ask why.
When I am at home in the weekend I will send you the code where you can change this behavior in WICD

Workarround for Wicd 1.6.2.2-3mlrepo1
cd /usr/share/wicd/wicd
cp winettools.py winettools.py.org
vi winettools.py
change the code at
cmd = ['wpa_supplicant'
in
cmd = ['nice', '-n', '19', 'wpa_supplicant'

After that move the compiled versions and reboot,
mv winettools.pyc winettools.pyc.org
This works fine for me since a month,
for more info about the symtons look at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/207446
and http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1343847&page=2