I’ve been going nuts on my new Dell notebook. Â Every time I attempted to reconnect to many of my home access points, I would get re-prompted for the wireless security key (some WEP, some WPA). Â Windows wasn’t remembering my wireless security key. Â I couldn’t find any way to get them to save. Â When I checked in the Wireless Center, only one connection was showing up (the one that saved the key information). Â Googling wasn’t coming up with much, other than suggestions to turn off “IEEE authentication” (I think what was meant was the IEEE 802.11 service management — that is, the WLAN service) or run MSConfig and turn off the adapter service.
The last one gave me a clue. Â The machine was installed (built by my IT support) with Intel PROSet/Wireless WiFi manager. Â I’d always ignored it, and just used Windows wifi management. Â Well … mistake. Â It turns out that if you have Intel PROSet running, you need to use it to start and stop all connections — otherwise, even if you’re exclusively using the Windows manager to start/stop, it won’t save your connection information. Â Switching to just using the Intel manager to start/stop solved my problem.