I can get my wireless network to connect without encryption, or with WEP 128 bit encryption, but can't seem to get it to work with WAP Pre-Shared Key encyryption.

I suspect that while windows can take a human readable pass-phrase, linux may require a translated form of it. I've seen some stuff in other threads about WPA_supplicant but that doesn't seem to exist on my machine. I have a Sony Viao PCG-K35 which comes with a built in Atheros wireless card, and I'm connecting to a NETGEAR WGR614 access point.

Should I try researching the supplicant stuff more, providing detailed dumps of key config files, or providing detailed hardware specs for my system?

Based on my current experience and research, the only way that most distros will use WPA encryption is through wpa_supplicant. It's not a very large download at all, so what I've done is downloaded it, hostap and all its utils, any associated help pages and anything else I though I'd need, burned it all to CD, and then installed it.

I find it absolutely bizarre that WPA support is so darned limited, seeing as how WEP these days is about as secure as a hole in the wall, but ...there it is.