Comment 14 for bug 1419464

I think it has something to do with parsing and writing wpa_supplicant configurations.

One of my affected networks uses WEP and surely had a working configuration of type "wep-hex" before. Nevertheless the network showed up in wicd-curses as "wpa-hex" instead of "wep-hex". After fixing this via wicd-curses, I had the line "wep_key0=S_KEY" (literally, i.e. an unexpanded variable name inside the wpa_supplicant configuration file. Of course wpa_supplicant choked on it:

Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
Line 7: Invalid WEP key 0 '$_KEY'.
Line 7: failed to parse wep_key0 '$_KEY'.
Line 11: failed to parse network block.
Failed to read or parse configuration '/var/lib/wicd/configurations/00…'.

Removing that aforementioned line (the correct key was still in line 8, also prefixed with "wep_key0="), wpa_supplicant can easily authenticate in that network again. Doesn't help for wicd as it seems to rewrite that file again before connecting and adds the" $_KEY" again.