Yeah that's what I was thinking.
I spent about a week's worth of evenings trying to get my network up and running before I tried wicd to no avail. During this time I must have edited 1 or 2 files about a million times entering pass phrases and stuff like that. I can only assume (uh oh) that it's picking up the pass phrase from one of these files. I might track down the text file with the passphrase in it, delete or change it, and then try and reconnect to my network to see if wicd prompts me to enter a passphrase.

Upon first-time connection with my ubuntu partition and my gf's windows laptop it DID ask for a pass phrase, so i'm not too worried

Cheers everyone,
mute