Mind that MAC address

I spent a good part of this morning trying to change wireless access points. The one I usually use lost internet access, so I changed to another one, and found that that one had also lost internet access.

I began to think that the internet might have gone out for our area, when I realized that the mac address of the access point I was connecting to was the same as the one of the access point I usually use... Even though I told my card to use the new ESSID, it was defaulting back to the first one, and not updating the ESSID in the list; so it looked like it was using the new ESSID, but the mac address of the AP it was connected to was that of the old ESSID.

I changed all the default settings and even screwed with the channel, but couldn't get it to consistently use the new ESSID for more than a few minutes. Strange.

At least I figured out what it was doing; it was even stranger when I seemed to be connected to the new network with settings from the old network!