Ugly Windows 8 Networking Issues: wireless profiles

I ran into a problem with connecting to a my wifi router (PHS-264 network name) from my Windows 8 HP laptop the other day.

Things had been working correctly with the router "open" (no WEP/WPA). Then I changed the router to require a WPA key. Windows dutifully asked me for the key when I next connected and things went fine.  Then, I again changed the router to disable WPA. This time Windows connected but showed limited internet access.  It got an P address fine, but would not go thru the router to the internet nr even allow me to log on to the router (192.168.0.1) to look at it.

All my other devices (tablet running android and iphone) seemed to work through this and connect, but not the laptop.

To fix the problem I ran the Windows 8 "netsh" command to list the profiles, then delete the router profile, then rebooted windows and things connected OK.

It looks like the router profile still required WPA key somehow and would not connect to router when WPA was disabled.

First show all profiles:

% netsh wlan show all

Then delete the router profile:

% netsh wlan delete profile PHS-264