I have two imacs here running 10.7.4 set to auto login with a standard user account. They have been paired with the wifi here which has a password and broadcasts its ssid.

For some reason, they refuse to auto connect to the airport when booted up. When clicking on the airport in the list, they immediately connect. (do not prompt for password) The airport is the only one in the airport adapter's wifi remembered networks list. The next time they are turned on, same problem again, won't auto connect to the airport. They also don't present a dialog box offering to connect to a wifi.

Any ideas?

I have observed the same behavior on my iMac when booted into 10.7, but not when booted into 10.6.

It seems related to the type of WiFi security, at least in my case. I did not have the problem when I was not using a WiFi password, and I also did not have the problem when I was using a WPA password, but I did start seeing it when I started using WPA-PSK2.

It's possible that is just a coincidence, of course, but it *seems* as if it's WPA-PSK2 that triggers the problem in Lion.

And it seems to be an observable problem in 10.8. The following is from a post on MacInTouch:

"Cornell University is seeing WiFi problems with 10.8 and 10.8.1. Recently they said there is a suspicion that there is a problem with the way Mac OS 10.8 and 10.8.1 communicate their readiness status to wireless access points. Because the Macs are not sending the communication that the access point expects, the two get out of sync, leading to connection problems and poor throughput. They say their wireless vendor has communicated the issue back to Apple."

I got an email notice to this watched topic when you replied. it gave me this link:

http://www.finetunedmac.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=23351#Post23351a

which says "Access Denied". Bug, or was the thread moved or something?

The post has been moved to a non-public area.

why non public?

Because it was spam.

oh, I thought you were referring to the entire thread.