So, after having plenty of trouble working on getting Gentoo set up to work with my new laptop, I'm finally able to run 'iwlist wlan0 scan' and see the 15 or so cells in immediate area.
Rather than going straight wpa_supplicant or using NetworkManager on this machine, I thought I'd give wicd a try. Trouble is, wicd, for whatever reason, isn't seeing any any of the cells. If I run "wicd-cli --wireless -l", I get a list's headers, but no observed networks. If I run "wicd-cli --wireless -S", I get no output at all. The page on gentoo-wiki.com for wicd[1] talks about a few configuration files for manual configuration, but those aren't present on the filesystem, and there are no manpages for them. [1] http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wicd#Manual_Configuration -- :wq