I doubt that there's anything that can be done about this, but I'm curious about why it happens...

When I put my deuced Mac(hina) to sleep by shutting the clamshell, iTunes sometimes makes an immediate connection with my Base Station when I re-open the clamshell and sometimes times out and reverts to my internal speakers, necessitating my re-selecting my Base Station.

Mail.app, on the other hand, invariably times out before fetching new mail.

Is the issue that iTunes is a slower starter than Mail and sometimes suffers from local interference...sometimes doesn't?

Thanks for any insight.

Edit: My Base Station and MacBook are 3 inches apart.

Sounds more like a race condition, your airport tying to reconnect while applications are trying to re-establish network connections.

You'd think OS X would have some mechanism in place to make apps wait 5 sec or so after wakeup for the network to come back up before trying to use it, but I don't think that happens. So, probably down to pot luck.

"Race" is the exact word I've used in my musings, but I'm wondering why Mail and Safari always lose while iTunes sometimes wins/sometimes loses?

> You'd think OS X would have some mechanism in place to make apps wait 5 sec or so after wakeup for the network to come back up before trying to use it, but I don't think that happens.

Good idea; maybe you can sell it to Apple.

I doubt you could "sell" the idea to Apple, but you can suggest it to them at Apple's Product Feedback. Don't expect a response — you won't get one, but this may show up either in a future Lion Update or OS X Upgrade. Most probably in a future OS X Upgrade.

I posted at both Hardware and Software Feedback since this issue is not clearly restricted to either.