wicd & general wifi problems

first off, I have no wifi hub, what I've been doing is using another laptop (alas, running vista) which was set to share Internet > then new conection > set up a wireless Ad-Hoc networl> named the network testing, and had it unsecured.

then on the aspire 150l (running ubuntu 9.04) I was able to find the network and connect through to the Internet. restart the Acer, and now it wont connect. spend a lot of time trying to replicate the conditions, and got nowhere.

I then found a reference on here for using Wicd instead. so installed that (which it then removed gnome-networkmanager) and as it was with gnome, it can see the network, but cannot connect to it (cant find the IP address)

works fine with ethernet, but I want to get wifi working for when I go to uni.

the other thing is that unlike gnome, it seems I cant switch off wifi if I dont use it (to prolong battery)

help please