I am visiting in a Mac house and was finally able to get on to the Airport wireless network. Part of the delay was the host being unable to recall their password. All is fine for me now.

But another guest cannot get on. The network shows up in the Wireless manager, we enter the password and NOTHING. The unconnected computer has connected many times at Starbucks, hotels, other peoples' networks without issue.

Any suggestions?

what type of encryption is it using?

my guess is wep. unfortunately, there is more than one way to hash the actual encryption key from a passphrase which causes problems between brands (not just apple). the way around this is to use the actual hex key and not the easier to remember phrase. there should be a way to obtain that key in the airport admin utility. alternately, pick a 5 character or 13 character passphrase which avoids the issue. wep is very easy to crack, so it really doesn't matter what you pick.

in any event, the first thing to try is disable the password entirely and see if the computer can connect. if it can (which i suspect it will), then you know where the problem is.

also, if the wireless network is in fact using wep, now's a good time to switch to wpa or wpa2, as it is a lot more secure and there is no issue with passphrase hashing.