Reconnecting to network after losing signal

[macbwizard]

My Macbook Pro has been acting strangly on my wireless network for about the last month. The airport signal will drop from full to nothing (it disconnects from the network) and then it won't reconnect automatically.

I end up clicking the airport icon in the menubar and manually selecting my network again and it connects fine at full strength.

The Macbook Pro has no problems connecting after sleep or restart, but after losing the signal (in a bizarre full to none way) it won't reconnect though it sees the network. The system preference is set to join this network automatically since it is the number one preferred network. Any ideas?

Thanks much

 

[Makosuke]

I've had this happen maybe once or twice on my MBP, too, no idea why. Definitely not actually a signal strength issue, since I'm not 20 feet from the base station and the signal strength is measureably fine. Otherwise perfect--I've put it to sleep probably 3-5 times a day for weeks and it reconnects almost instantly every time.

I also had an experience today, probably related, where it seemed to drop the connection although it didn't--it still showed full bars in the display, but I couldn't get any network access (including pinging other computers on the local network directly, or finding the base station in Airport Admin, though I was ostensibly connected to it). The actual 'net connection was fine, as my wife was on my tower at the time and had no issues (it's wired to the ABS), and when I turned AirPort off then back on on the 'Book, it kicked in and worked perfectly.

The MBPs use a new wireless adapter if I'm not mistaken, so perhaps there's a driver bug. I'll wait until 10.4.7 comes out to even start thinking about it in earnest, since right now we're talking a minor annoyance maybe once a week in my case, and I've been using the connection quite heavily (a LOT of VNC).

MacFixIt has an item up about kernel panics, possibly related to heavy traffic, on AirPort with MacBook Pros, but I've seen nothing of the sort so far. Maybe what we're seeing is realated to the same problematic driver.