OK I can do this manually every time but I don't understand what it is that kwifi is doing. Obviously there is a step I am missing somewhere. Can anyone help?
It sounds like either your encryption is set up wrong or you are accidentally putting the card in ad-hoc mode (card to card rather than card to AP)
Then kwifi is putting the correct settings over the top.
With the encryption nothing actually knows if you have (for example) the key wrong somewhere...It's just that the requests and packets are unreadable at each end...so your DHCP request is garbled and you would be unable to decrypt the server response even if it gave you one....nothing will actually necessarily tell you this..you just won't be able to see the network even though it looks like you are connected.