Why does network-manager always keep trying to connect to neighbours wifi?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin with graphic interface gnome3.

My wifi card detects like 20 diffrent acces points. Sometimes I want to stay unconnected, but not have to disable my wifi device. I keep getting popups requesting WEP and WPA passwords.

I went to net config window and disabled the 'Connect Automatically' for all the acces points I could (like 5 of them).

The other 15 I cannot access the checkbox to turn off the automatically option and I keep getting popups requesting passwords. I not only get 1 popup for every attempt, I get two for each one, one from network-manager and another one from gnome3. This last one I cannot move to a side, it literally blocks up all the screen. And when it's gone over all the access points, it starts again with the first one...

I really want to know if there is some way to turn off this 'need for connection' that the ubuntu 12.04 network-manager has. And simply let the wifi card enabled but without attempting connections. I could do it on 10.04.

I really think that having to turn off the 'Automatically connect' for all of the access points my card detects is not the way to do it. Even if I try to, I keep having like 15 of them with the grey, unaccessable checkbox.

I appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Bring up a terminal to execute commands (CTRL + ALT + T is a shortcut). Type the following command, press Enter, and submit password.

sudo nautilus '/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections'

Your computer stores a network profile any time a connection attempt is made even when a connection is not fully established. It sounds like you just need to clean out this folder to fix the issue by deleting all the network profiles you do not need to keep.