Vista won't save WPA passphrase

G'day. Looking for a little help here. The cable fella who came to
install our connection, modem and wifi network set it up as WEP with a
pretty unimpressive key, so I've changed it over to WPA and something a
lot more random for all the obvious reasons. One tiny little fly in the
ointment is that no matter what I do our Vista laptop keeps trying to
use the old WEP key and I can't figure out how to get it to stop. It's
set on WPA-Personal and AES and seems happy enough to save those
settings, but I can tell with half an eye that the key isn't long enough
to be the one I keep putting in. And when I paste the new key into it it
connects for a while, but eventually drops and tries to use the damn WEP
key again. Ditto reboots and waking from sleep. Have I missed something
obvious? Do I need to delete that whole set of connection settings and
just set it up again (which worked on my Mac)? If so how do I do that?

A quick follow up. I'm temporarily Boot Camping Vista on the MacBook
which has already connected to the wireless network on these settings.
Complete failure. How can the same password work in OS X but not in
Vista? I can't be mistyping it because I've been copying and pasting it
from a document on USB flash drive in both cases.

I am not sure I understand the issue. Have you changed it on both Vista and
router/AP?

Is there a utility running on the laptop which thinks it needs to connect
your wireless for you?

If the cable guy just added a new connection the utility might think the
settings are wrong and "correct" it for you. Either kill the utility or tell
it what the new settings are.

Yep. Router first, notebooks second. As per my follow up, the same
steps and settings and key get a connection with Vista running on a
MacBook in Boot Camp, but fail on an HP Compaq notebook PC.

If you can use WEB but not WPA, I would check if there is a new firmware for
the router or driver for the NIC. This search result may help.
Vista Wireless Issues
Vista can use WEP but WPA · Vista Desktop PC wireless connection
issues, problems · Vista sees network, but won't connect ...

I'll look into that but I'm not optimistic since WPA is
working just fine on the MacBook for both OS X and Vista, which suggests
a problem unique to the HP notebook. All drivers are up to date and
according to HP it should support WPA out of the box. Router firmware is
a bit of an unknown since my ISP update that automatically and I have to
assume they're reasonably prompt about it, but as I said WPA works with
another machine and with Vista. As far as the two Vista installations go
there are certainly differences - the HP has SP1 and the Mac hasn't,
also various amounts of HP utilities and obviously different hardware.
Not sure why any of that would prevent Vista from saving a new
passphrase but something is. Just to see what would happen I changed it
again on the router and then on both the notebooks. OS X changed fine,
the Vista installation on the MacBook changed fine, but again on the HP
it appeared to change but when I clicked properties a second time and
went back to the passphrase field there were 9 hidden characters again
(the length of the old WEP one) instead of the 20+ I'd just pasted in.
As I've said I'm following the same steps in Vista on both the HP and
Mac. :confused:

[awesomeness648]

-890-[]\\\=ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp--oolllllll,lllllllllllloppppppppppppppp------pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp

Above is what my 1 year old suggest. I informed that I don't who can pull that off...

Any time I see someone has this issue I have them remove the network from there preferred network list and re-connect to the network as if this the first time it's using the network or go through the manual connection for the wireless network.

Don't know if this is any help or if you already tried this but I was just researching an issue like this for a friend (so I assume it's common with Vista) but this is what I told him to try first.

It turned out that its password neurosis wasn't its only problem and the
motherboard failed before I ever found how to fix the resetting WPA
password problem..... about 2-3 weeks after I posted here in fact. After
that experience and a crap HP printer bought around the same time you
couldn't pay me to walk out a shop with an HP product. We just left
Vista on the MacBook and haven't looked back, though using it pretty
infrequently these days and 90% of the time in OS X. Apart from having
to deal with the fact that Apple like to think they all walk on water
it's hunky dory.