Hmmm. I have an ath wifi card and netgear router and using wep or wpa2 is fine.
Why would booting be involved with the wifi.sh unless you added 'wifi.sh auto' to your boot process?
Which you should only do upon success via the icon as instructed in the info file.
Very interesting that you claim that subsequent use of wifi.sh does nothing.
What error(s) if any are displayed when run from an xterm?
If you have never successfully connected then your wifi.db should be empty.
If your wifi.db is empty and you have added the instruction wifi.sh auto to your boot process then that whould explain things.
However, FWIW, wifi.sh is frugally functional. Tested on three different wifi cards and several routers without issue. However, no claim that wifi.sh will be a panacea for wifi issues.
If you added wifi.sh to your boot process, remove it.
Boot with the network starter pack. Before using wifi.sh, type
iwconfig to see that a wifi device was successfully made. Which BTW, is the real purpose of the network starter pack.
If you have a very slow to register wifi device then you may have to resort to manual commands, e.g.,
sudo -s
iwconfig <yourDevice> essid <yourSSID> key <yourPassword>
ifconfig <yourDevice> up
udhcpc -i <yourDevice>