I was using the default network manager to connect to my wi-fi network, but if the connection is dropped or router restarted the network manager wont reconnect automatically after i guess a couple of tries and just gives a pop-up to connect manually .
To avoid this annoyance I installed WICD but though it does try to reconnect to the network after a drop in connection it is unable to resolve the ip address and i am left with an even bigger annoyance .
1. Is there a way to counter either of these issues ?
2. Something like a background process that will check network status periodically and then try to connect to a favored network ?

Edit- out put of lshw -C network

*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: Broadcom Corporation
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:12:00.0
logical name: eth1
version: 01
serial: c0:cb:38:18:9b:7f
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=5.60.48.36 ip=192.168.11.2 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
resources: irq:17 memory:fbc00000-fbc03fff
*-network
description: Ethernet interface
product: RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:13:00.0
logical name: eth0
version: 02
serial: f0:4d:a2:94:2d:74
size: 10MB/s
capacity: 100MB/s
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation
configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10MB/s
resources: irq:29 ioport:e000(size=256) memory:d0b10000-d0b10fff(prefetchable) memory:d0b00000-d0b0ffff(prefetchable) memory:fb200000-fb21ffff(prefetchable)