2009/2/14 daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com>
I was bored and playing around with macchanger to change my Wireless MAC address, and wireless has not worked since, even though I'm using my hardware MAC address again.  I'm usually using NetworkManager, but I also installed Wicd to see if I could avoid the problem that way.  The problem seems to lie in the WEP password authentication to the local network.

NetworkManager just kept asking for the password over and over again, never connecting.  Wicd will claim to connect and issue an IP address, but the wireless does not function. 

I'm a dolt; the problem was that the gnome default keyring got mucked up by the changed MAC (which you could probably anticipate), and then that's why NetworkManager stopped working.  I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I took a backup copy of ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default* and now it's fine again.  Probably you could delete these files and then the nm-applet will make them again, but I'm lazy. 

I still didn't get wicd working, but I never had that working before, so that's probably a configuration issue, and in any case clearly unrelated to toying around with my MAC address (since I installed wicd later anyway); I originally though since NM was also assigning the default IP addresses that it might be related, but that's because I'm inexperienced.

I'm a little embarassed that the solution was so easy and obvious and I bothered everyone.  But I did learn some things in the process, so I appreciate the feedback a lot.  So, as I eventually move to use wicd, the comments here will be helpful for me.

Regards,
daid