Its been long since I blogged here. Nevertheless I am back.
I recently made a great discovery of an alternative to NetworkManager, yes that God forsaken connection manager. Those days when I had to click the network manager icon and enter my wireless key a dozen times, every time it disconnects, have finally gone.
I feel every Linux user should know about this hassle free networking tool.
It is named "Wicd" (read as wicked) and can be found on sourceforge
It is more like a front-end for wpa_supplicant and ifconfig.

It can save the network profiles, not just for wireless networks, but for wired networks as well. Think how easy it would be if you have different ethernet configurations at home and office, and your connection manager just connects to them without asking you a single question? And yes it is impeccable.

Ubuntu users can add the line "deb http://apt.wicd.net gutsy extras" to their /etc/apt/sources.list. Make sure you change 'gutsy' to what ever your distribution is. Just issue "sudo apt-get install wicd" to install it.
Beware that Wicd will uninstall NetworkManager(a very good thing!), which means you cannot switch back to NetworkManager without uninstalling Wicd and reinstalling NetworkManager.

There are instructions for Arch as well on their download page.
Other distro users may have to compile it from source.

It seems to support PEAP as well, should give it a try on my university wireless network.
Wicd is a must if you are frustrated with NetworkManager like me
Now I can just forget about connecting to the network and just begin my work :-)