I recently bought a NETGEAR MR314 wireless router to make my life easier. The wireless features and the four port switch made it ideal for me. Of course, I wish to protect my wireless LAN, so I set it to do 128bit WEP using a password and a generated key. The browser-based administration of the NETGEAR makes this possible quite easily even on my Mac (no, I do not work for them, just the truth).
Much to my surprise, the Airport card refused to login to the access point when I used my set password; instead I had to use the 128bit hex key from the page of the administration Tool on the Netgear router. In the Apple Airport dialog box, you do not select "Password" from the drop down, you select "128bit-hex" and after doing that, it works flawlessly.
Took me some time to find this one, but after finding it, I must say, that I am most pleased with the product; it is definitely worth the money, at least for me.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20021121060144214