I'm experimenting with ZenWalk Live 7.0 on an acer aspire one to see if it's a feasible alternative to Ubuntu and I'm encountering the following problem.

When I start Wicd for the first time after a boot (by clicking the icon in the panel at the bottom), it finds a number of networks; usually one is a hidden (and named 'hidden') one which is (more than likely) my wifi connection; the other ones are the neighbors, I guess.
If I go to network menu -> find a hidden network and I enter my essid, it's not found; I can jump high and low, but the screen tells me that there are no wireles networks found at all; not even the ones that were initially found are shown.

The only way that I seem to be able to connect to my hidden wireless network is with the following steps after a reboot
1)
Select properties for the hidden network that is initially picked up; I do not see the option to enter an essid there but I can enter my passphrase.
2)
Try to connect to that hidden network, which will fail. What I don't like about this step is that I don't know what I'm connecting to.
3)
Next use network menu -> find a hidden network, enter the essid and click connect
4)
Success guaranteed

Am I missing something ?

Additional info: the standard OS (Crunchbang Statler) on this system never fails to connect, so I guess it's something funny with wicd.

Wicd can act odd at times but I have not seen this before. Have you tried any other versions of zenwalk to see if you are getting the same behavior?

on a side note. There is not really a reason to hide your ssid. The AP does not broadcast it, however all clients do broadcast it when connected. If there is even a single person connected then anyone monitoring can see the ssid. Same goes for mac filtering. Even if running WEP/WPA/WPA2 the mac address is not encrypted and is sent across the air in the clear so someone can simply watch for a minute or 2 and get your essid and mac address and send a disconnect to your router as your mac address and then start seeing authentication packets to decrypt.

I have been running wicd on a Slackware 13.37 installation on my Thinkpad Edge laptop. I rceognise the "Select Properties and enter passphrase" bit of the above.

It seems to be what I have to do every time to get a quick connection, despite the fact that the passphrase is saved in the wicd config. Essentially I open the Properties dialog box, go to the passphrase field, see my passphrase there and click OK. Connection works fine. If I do not do this, the connection sometimes works, but generally does not.

I have not investigated but I am assuming that when I do this I update a wicd config file somewhere and if I fail to do so, it looks at the wrong config file, or at the wrong fields in the same config file.

Slackware forum carried some discussion about wicd not being actively maintained a few months ago, and I think quite a few slackers just use command line (iwconfig / dhcpcd etc) to connect to wifi.