Comment 7 for bug 162710

I ran into this bug on Intrepid. It seems like a fairly common problem, and it's not intuitive to work around it for several reasons:

1. Most users don't know what a keyring is, or that Ubuntu stores their WEP key using the keyring.
2. Even for users who understand this, they would not realize that their login password was being used to access the keyring because it just works - until you change your password.

For me, the problem was particularly bad because I changed my password months before I installed a wireless card. I was upgrading a desktop that I moved to a room far away from my router. If I already had a wireless card installed and then I changed my password, I would perhaps notice the correlation. In my case, I never thought that the bug would be related to something I did months ago. Luckily the forums provided insight. The problem with fixing network bugs is that you need an internet-accessible computer to search the forums and bug reports.

This bug also crashed my network manager applet, as far as I can tell. I had no nm-applet in the taskbar, but the process was running. When I re-synced the keyring and login passwords and restarted my computer, the nm-applet reappeared in the taskbar and the wireless connection loaded by default.

Long story short, it seems like an important bug to fix that would make Ubuntu more accessible to everyday folks.