This latest version of NetworkManager (NetworkManager-0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3370.fc8) that went out today changed the appearance of the popup menu. Under wireless networks I see a list of the networks in my area. Next to my specific network (daryllnet) there is a submenu. That submenu has a huge list of entries that all say "auto daryllnet". I have always had somewhat odd behavior with NetworkManager. Sometimes I have to kill it and restart it to get it to see and connect to my networks. I had to do that today with the newest NetworkManager release. Sometimes I found that if the network was displayed selecting it multiple times would get it to connect. Some times I found that killing and restarting it didn't fix the problem but saying "connect to other wireless network" and filling in the values for my network would get it to connect when daryllnet wasn't showing up in the menu. My suspicion is that every time I told it to connect to another network it made another one of those submenu entries. I'd like to clean up the entries in the submenu, but I can't find where they're stored. I'd like to have the connections be more reliable. That may already be true with the new kernel and new NetworkManager, but I can't tell until I run it longer.
These entries were due to a bug in the NM applet before multiple connection support landed. You're completely right, the applet was not correctly finding and matching existing saved networks when you picked "Connect to other...". You can remove the ones you don't need by right-clicking on the NM applet and choosing "Edit connections...", or you can run /usr/bin/nm-connection-editor and delete the ones you do not need. Let me know if that works for you!
I went through all of them and deleted them until I was down to one. That fixed the problem. I'm not sure if this is "Fixed" or "NotABug" so I'll let you close it.
All the bugs that caused the behavior have been fixes, so Fixed it is. Thanks!