Weird MacBook Pro wifi behaviour

Another one to file under “weird shit behaviour”. Tonight, my Macbook Pro (a late 2006 model, but now running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1) decided that it didn’t want to connect to the house Wifi network. What transpired to fix it was a lot of mucking about with the Airport config on the machine…

Thinking that the (vintage) Linksys router in the house was the cause—as it has been on numerous occasions before—I dutifully restarted it, but no joy. My iPhone was fine on the wifi network however, so it seemed to eliminate the router as the cause. Meanwhile, Macbook Pro resolutely would not connect to the network, despite knowing how to do so having done so several hundred times before.

After a bit of digging, it seemed that the machine had just screwed up knowing how to connect to that particular network, but just attempting a reconnect and re-entering the WPA password for the network didn’t help.

In the end, I had to do this:

1. Turn off Airport, then in the Airport settings delete the remembered network.

2. On the router, change the wifi network temporarily to be open (no password).

3. Get the Macbook to connect to the now-open network. It worked.

4. Switch of Airport and then delete the now-remembered open network from the Airport settings.

5. On the router, re-enable the WPA encryption (relief! .

6. Back on the Mac, now get it to connect to the network again from scratch: enter WPA password, and in the immortal words of a certain Apple-y leader : “Boom!”… it works again.

Something somewhere on the Mac obviously went screwy, but simply forgetting and then immediately reconnecting to the same network (exactly) doesn’t seem to cure it. Connecting to (what appears to be) a different network first seemed to do the trick.

Weird. Any one else seen this!?