Why Did The Wizard Work???

Had a major WinXP Pro meltdown on one of my laptops (stupid story deleted) and
needed to do a full reinstall, which I did as a dual-boot setup with the
expectation of deleting the old installation once the new installation was
fully functional.

It went almost eerily smoothly, until...

I had been using a wired connection to my home network, just for the speed
factors when downloading stuff like SP2. Then it became time to get the
wireless connection working. Having older WEP-only hardware, this should have
been just a matter of adding the WEP key (128 bit).

This was the first time I'd needed to add a WEP key since SP2 came out, which
might be related to the problem, but I flat-out couldn't get the network to
pick up my laptop and assign an IP address. Clearly the WEP key wasn't being
accepted properly. I observed that my notes for the WEP key had a distinctive
break after 26 of the hex characters, and I had the vague recollection that
some hardware would allow me to specify all 32 hex chars, and others would
only accept 26. (Can anyone explain that one to me?) But multiple attempts
to enter either the 26 or the 32 characters failed to allow connection to the
network.

I started to Google things, hoping I could export network information from the
old (but still-working) installation and import it into the new XP's registry.
While researching that possibility, I stumbled on the Wireless Network Wizard,
with which I was unfamiliar.

I ran it on the new XP, entered the 26-char WEP key just like I'd
unsuccessfully done without the wizard, and Bingo - everything magically came
up and Life Is Good again.

Does anyone have an informed guess as to why manual entry of the key failed
whereas the wizard magically worked???

Art