I figured out what was happening last night. DUH! User error, as us(er)ual. I missed the part of the readme for the drivers that said to preface the encryption string with 0x if hex encoding is used. Once I corrected that, everything else fell into place.

In my defence, I was confused by the fact that the WiFiState utility comes up and indicates a valid connection, even if there is no "logical" connection. Some sort of error message indicating an invalid password was used would really be desireable here. As a result, I was "fooled" into thinking I had set it up properly.

Thanks for your response. I understand that you are the drivers author. Other than that issue, the install and subsequent setup went fairly smoothly, and it works really well. Good work.