Resetting PSK for WPA

[Patton Echols <p echols comcast net>]

There's a question here, but let me tell why first . . .

After hearing the vulnerability of WPA to attacks on short pre-shared 
keys, I decided to reset my wireless routers to more robust keys.

Resetting Network Manager to use a different key was more of a 
challenge. (I had thought that, upon finding that it's psk was wrong, it 
would ask for a new one)  But it didn't.  NM just kept trying to connect. 

After some judicious googling, I found two instructions:

The first (I think on Darren  Alber's faq?  but now I can't find the 
page)  was to reset the SSID with the following command:

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset 
/system/networking/wireless/networks/<ssid> with <ssid> replaced with 
the correct one. (for what it's worth the correct directory on my ubuntu 
system is:
~/.gconf/system/networking/wireless/networks/<ssid> and gconftools does 
not like the "." in the directory name)

At any rate, once getting to the correct place, gconftool-2 did not 
return any output, and a search of the man page did not reveal an 
obvious "verbose" switch.  But since there was no error, I restarted NM 
using:
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
No luck, NM continued trying to connect with the old key. 

The second instruction was more of a brute force approach.  Go to  
~/.gconf/system/networking/wireless/networks/ and removing the directory 
named <ssid> Again replacing with the correct name.  Another dbus 
restart, no change.


FInally, having searched for quite some time to see if the old psk was 
stored elsewhere, I re-booted the system.  That finally worked -- and 
now I'm finally getting to the question.

As a linux newbie, one of the things I like is the ability to tweak, 
break, fix etc the system without having to reboot all the time.  I 
assumed that I should be able to do so with NM and with other issues a 
dbus restart is just what is needed.  Can't I do this without a reboot?  
Another way of asking: Where was my old key stored and what should I 
have restarted so that NM would be forced to ask me for the new one?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Patton