More WiFi mischief in Bookworm

After a month or so of working well, the wifi has again started acting
strange after a series of software updates on a Pi5 running Bookworm.

Now the most obvious problem shown in journalctl seems to be authentication.
Entries reporting "no secrets" and authentication failed seem to be the norm.

At the same time, sometimes wifi will work long enough to let half or so
of a homepage load.

One report on the web suggested that certain characters in passwords
were not handled correctly in bookworm. The only "special" character
I use is a period (.), which according to all reports I can find is
legal for ssid passwords.

Those clues don't square with each other very well, but they're all I have
for now. The AP works fine with other hosts and is the strongest signal
by about 20 dB. A second host in the same location as the Bookworm machine
has no trouble connecting.

Thanks for reading, and any ideas.

bob prohaska