Vista won't save WPA passphrase

[stripey]

G'day. Looking for a little help here. The cable fella who came to install our connection, modem and wifi network set it up as WEP with a pretty unimpressive key, so I've changed it over to WPA and something a lot more random for all the obvious reasons. One tiny little fly in the ointment is that no matter what I do our Vista laptop keeps trying to use the old WEP key and I can't figure out how to get it to stop. It's set on WPA-Personal and AES and seems happy enough to save those settings, but I can tell with half an eye that the key isn't long enough to be the one I keep putting in. And when I paste the new key into it it connects for a while, but eventually drops and tries to use the damn WEP key again. Ditto reboots and waking from sleep. Have I missed something obvious? Do I need to delete that whole set of connection settings and just set it up again (which worked on my Mac)? If so how do I do that?

Thanks in advance.
Stripey.

[stripey]

A quick follow up. I'm temporarily Boot Camping Vista on the MacBook which has already connected to the wireless network on these settings. Complete failure. How can the same password work in OS X but not in Vista? I can't be mistyping it because I've been copying and pasting it from a document on USB flash drive in both cases.

I am not sure I understand the issue. Have you changed it on both Vista and
router/AP?

--
Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on
http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on
http://www.HowToNetworking.com
"stripey" <stripey.3kc3wh@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:stripey.3kc3wh@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> G'day. Looking for a little help here. The cable fella who came to
> install our connection, modem and wifi network set it up as WEP with a
> pretty unimpressive key, so I've changed it over to WPA and something a
> lot more random for all the obvious reasons. One tiny little fly in the
> ointment is that no matter what I do our Vista laptop keeps trying to
> use the old WEP key and I can't figure out how to get it to stop. It's
> set on WPA-Personal and AES and seems happy enough to save those
> settings, but I can tell with half an eye that the key isn't long enough
> to be the one I keep putting in. And when I paste the new key into it it
> connects for a while, but eventually drops and tries to use the damn WEP
> key again. Ditto reboots and waking from sleep. Have I missed something
> obvious? Do I need to delete that whole set of connection settings and
> just set it up again (which worked on my Mac)? If so how do I do that?
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Stripey.
>
>
> --
> stripey
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

Is there a utility running on the laptop which thinks it needs to connect
your wireless for you?

If the cable guy just added a new connection the utility might think the
settings are wrong and "correct" it for you. Either kill the utility or tell
it what the new settings are.


"stripey" <stripey.3kc3wh@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:stripey.3kc3wh@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> G'day. Looking for a little help here. The cable fella who came to
> install our connection, modem and wifi network set it up as WEP with a
> pretty unimpressive key, so I've changed it over to WPA and something a
> lot more random for all the obvious reasons. One tiny little fly in the
> ointment is that no matter what I do our Vista laptop keeps trying to
> use the old WEP key and I can't figure out how to get it to stop. It's
> set on WPA-Personal and AES and seems happy enough to save those
> settings, but I can tell with half an eye that the key isn't long enough
> to be the one I keep putting in. And when I paste the new key into it it
> connects for a while, but eventually drops and tries to use the damn WEP
> key again. Ditto reboots and waking from sleep. Have I missed something
> obvious? Do I need to delete that whole set of connection settings and
> just set it up again (which worked on my Mac)? If so how do I do that?
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Stripey.
>
>
> --
> stripey
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

[stripey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert L. \(MS-MVP\)

I am not sure I understand the issue. Have you changed it on both Vista and router/AP?

Yep. Router first, notebooks second. As per my follow up, the same steps and settings and key get a connection with Vista running on a MacBook in Boot Camp, but fail on an HP Compaq notebook PC.

[stripey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dominic Payer

Is there a utility running on the laptop which thinks it needs to connect your wireless for you?

If the cable guy just added a new connection the utility might think the
settings are wrong and "correct" it for you. Either kill the utility or tell
it what the new settings are.

That's an interesting thought. HP have included this ridiculous nanny feature called Credential Manager that has a habit of popping up and whingeing about wanting to take care of credentials for everything from passwords on web pages on up. It has to be an HP thing rather than Vista because it's doesn't appear on the Vista installation on the Mac. Usually we tell it to stuff off but possibly it was set up for WLAN connection by the cable fella. I'll try shutting it down and seeing what happens.

Edit: nope, no luck there. When I tried to connect I got the same result as last time, a message saying that it failed "for an unknown reason". There was an option to use the event viewer to see more about the problem, which I'd never looked at before, but it wasn't a lot of help. "Unable to open the log or custom view. Verify that the event log service is running." Well I sure as hell haven't turned it off and it's logging other non-networking events, so I assume it is.

If you can use WEB but not WPA, I would check if there is a new firmware for
the router or driver for the NIC. This search result may help.
Vista Wireless Issues
Vista can use WEP but WPA · Vista Desktop PC wireless connection
issues, problems · Vista sees network, but won't connect ...
www.wifimvp.com/vistawireless.htm


--
Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on
http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on
http://www.HowToNetworking.com
"stripey" <stripey.3kdvsb@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:stripey.3kdvsb@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> Robert L. \(MS-MVP\);1103314 Wrote:
>> I am not sure I understand the issue. Have you changed it on both Vista
>> and router/AP?
> Yep. Router first, notebooks second. As per my follow up, the same
> steps and settings and key get a connection with Vista running on a
> MacBook in Boot Camp, but fail on an HP Compaq notebook PC.
>
>
> --
> stripey
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

[stripey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert L. \(MS-MVP\)

If you can use WEB but not WPA, I would check if there is a new firmware for
the router or driver for the NIC. This search result may help.
Vista Wireless Issues
Vista can use WEP but WPA · Vista Desktop PC wireless connection
issues, problems · Vista sees network, but won't connect ...
Vista Wireless Issues

Thanks Robert. I'll look into that but I'm not optimistic since WPA is working just fine on the MacBook for both OS X and Vista, which suggests a problem unique to the HP notebook. All drivers are up to date and according to HP it should support WPA out of the box. Router firmware is a bit of an unknown since my ISP update that automatically and I have to assume they're reasonably prompt about it, but as I said WPA works with another machine and with Vista. As far as the two Vista installations go there are certainly differences - the HP has SP1 and the Mac hasn't, also various amounts of HP utilities and obviously different hardware. Not sure why any of that would prevent Vista from saving a new passphrase but something is. Just to see what would happen I changed it again on the router and then on both the notebooks. OS X changed fine, the Vista installation on the MacBook changed fine, but again on the HP it appeared to change but when I clicked properties a second time and went back to the passphrase field there were 9 hidden characters again (the length of the old WEP one) instead of the 20+ I'd just pasted in. As I've said I'm following the same steps in Vista on both the HP and Mac.

-890-[]\\\=ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp--oolllllll,lllllllllllloppppppppppppppp------pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp pppppppp

Above is what my 1 year old suggest. I informed that I don't who can
pull that off...

Any time I see someone has this issue I have them remove the network
from there preferred network list and re-connect to the network as if
this the first time it's using the network or go through the manual
connection for the wireless network.

Don't know if this is any help or if you already tried this but I was
just researching an issue like this for a friend (so I assume it's
common with Vista) but this is what I told him to try first.


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[stripey]

It turned out that its password neurosis wasn't its only problem and the motherboard failed before I ever found how to fix the resetting WPA password problem..... about 2-3 weeks after I posted here in fact. After that experience and a crap HP printer bought around the same time you couldn't pay me to walk out a shop with an HP product. We just left Vista on the MacBook and haven't looked back, though using it pretty infrequently these days and 90% of the time in OS X. Apart from having to deal with the fact that Apple like to think they all walk on water it's hunky dory.