It's an even more general issue I think. The problem is, whenever
anything goes wrong in the connection process, nm-applet asks the user
for a password. It makes no difference, whether the wifi went down
completely, the dhcp server didn't respond or anything else happened.
Most of the times, it totally makes no sense, to ask the user for a new
password. A clear error message with the reason for the connection
problem, or the possibility to provide manual network configuration e.g.
if dhcp fails, would be much better.

I'm travelling a lot and use new wifis nearly every day. Lots of them
are badly maintained hotel or restaurant wifis. Given correct
credentials, most connection problems are cause by bad connectivity,
someone switching of the wifi unexpectedly, or by problems with the DHCP
server on the router. While of course nothing helps against the first,
just setting the IP address manually to something like 192.168.1....
sometimes does the job. So if there would be some proper exception
handling for the connection process, a menu to enter configuration
settings manually could be provided, or some configurations could be
tried out automatically, even if DHCP setup fails.

And for bad connectivity or network shutdowns, this could be handled by
retries with increased timeout and clear error messages, finally
switching to other networks if available, without disturbing the user
with a password dialogue. For the inexperienced user this is just
totally misleading and keeps him retrying, while there is no hope for
cure for the connection at all.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1010745

Title:
  network-manager forgets my password when an error occurs

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