Can't connect to network anymore

[fogelfink]

I need some help getting my wireless connection working again.

Everything worked fine and out of the box with my fedora10 install - for which I was very grateful seeing that I tried Ubuntu for the last 8 months and was struggling with precisely this problem.

Network manager shows my wifi network, which has been set to auto connect , but keeps prompting me for the network key. When I enter the key it tries to connect, seems to fail and then prompts again.
As I said, I know the issue from Ubuntu, but until now that did not happen in fedora - only since I installed Sun's VirtualBox. I have no idea how those issues could be connected, but let me give you an idea what I did to end up with this strange behaviour.

I downloaded the VirtualBox rpm from the website and ran the package installer. However, when trying to run the application it told me that something went wrong in the install, so i checked the log, which mentioned that I needed the gss and dkms packages installed. So I did install them, which required a bunch of kernel headers for gss/dkms (not sure which one it was) and then recompiled the VirtualBox kernel module, and it worked! So far so good. Next time I reboot my computer, however, this prompting for the wireless key started appearing and I could not connect to my wireless wep-network any more. So I went through my network settings, deleted the auto-connect entry and whoops, I could not see any wireless networks!!! I'm getting slightly nervous at that point, check the network device settings, seeing that wireless is inactive, but have no idea how to activate it.
I then followed this thread about "Getting NetworkManager to work at boot"

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=208296

. As a result of following its steps I could see available networks again and hooray network manager did connect to my network again. Having used Linux for the last 8 months, I thought, better not to trust the feeling of having solved anything and therefore rebooted my computer.

The result leads me to ask you for help - I am back to square one: I can see the available networks, but can't connect - and by the way since this whole VirtualBox install business, my boot time has roughly doubled.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH - Linux, hey, there's no way I'm going back to a proprietary operating system and I love the open source community, but I do wish that things would be a bit easier sometimes...