NetworkManager: a tale of two laptops

[Timothy Murphy]

I have two laptops, elizabeth and mary,
with identical PCMCIA WiFi cards, Orinoco Gold (firmware 6.04).

I have two APs, with ESSIDs (say) wrt and agere.

NM (NetworkManager) works fine on mary,
linking always to wrt on eth1.

NM never works on elizabeth,
trying for some reason to link to agere on eth1.

"service network" links elizabeth to agere on eth2.

So WiFi works perfectly on both machines,
but NM works only on one.

I have compared all the files I can think of,
and see no difference between the laptops.

I do not know where NM keeps the information it uses
on networks.
I would like to tell it to try to link to wrt on elizabeth,
but as I say do not know where it keeps this preference.

The documentation on NM, such as there is,
says that "NM just works",
but unfortunately does not give any hint of what to do
if NM "just doesn't work".