My wireless card was doing fine until I started using a encrypted wireless connection. Every time I get disconnected from my router it automatically tries to log my back on if it fails the first time my wireless program tells me other networks I could connect to but for some reason the only way to get my wireless card to work is to reboot. I did not modify it hardware wise at all. It used to run windows now it runs linux mint. If it help any here are the specs:

Intel atom n270
1 gig ddr ram
160 gig hard drive
Wifi 802.11B/G/N
3 cell lithium ion battery
1.3Mega pixel camera
operating system Linux Mint

router:
Brand: Netgear
no macaddress filter
settings are web based
model WGR614 v7
speed 54 mbps

One last thing these connecting problems have been going around in the past week and the router has been up for two weeks now.

It's an Debian (and derivative, including Ubuntu, Mint and Kubuntu) bug. Try with Fedora on an USB thumb drive, if it work fine (and it probably will) then you should consider switching to it. I really tried to solve that bug too, but replacing wireless-utils, compiling a kernel or disabling NM don't help, it is just not stable. The signal strength in Ubuntu is ~20% of what you will find in any other distribution. It's too low for encrypted connection, they can't stay stable for more than a minute. The old MadWifi driver work better then the Ath9k used in recent versions, but it is unmaintained and require the last SVN revision to support your card (Athreos B/G/N).

You did add the passphrase to wpa_supplicant.conf, aftyer processing with wpa_passphrase? For an essid of myplace and a password of somesillynonsense, it looks like this
network={
ssid="myplace"
#psk="somesillynonsense"
psk=0351a608fb5c37023a00d896553261b37244c83d7a16019efcf0bdfc3955377b
}

the chunk from network to } goes in as an entry.

Fedora sounds like a good distro to try always wondered about it and pclinux os sorry about taking so long to respond i am new to this website and was trying to find my form.