I am trying to connect my to my wlan without the use of NetworkManager. I run the following commands after boot:

iwconfig wlan0 enc <WEP passwd> mode managed essid <name> channel 6
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0

At this point, dhclient stalls for ages (perhaps 2 minutes), then it returns with

PING 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254) from 192.168.1.65 wlan0: 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 192.168.1.254 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 received, +3 errors, 100% packet loss, time 3000ms
pipe 3

.. The strange thing is that when I run pkill dhclient; dhclient wlan0 right after this, it connects in about <3 seconds.

Any idea what could be the cause of this problem?

Edit: oh, and I did try using the -timeout flag on dhclient but that didn't seem to make any difference (it still stalled for ages).