When a hotspot doesn't broadcast an ESSID, some drivers (such as ipw) report it with the <hidden> ESSID. drakroam correctly handles this case: it shows the access point MAC address when it doesn't know the hidden ESSID, and it shows the ESSID if the hidden hotspot has already been configured.

Well, at least it did handle that when wpa_supplicant was used, but it was broken for the "standard" way (using iwlist). I must have been on drugs when I wrote this piece of code, but it is now fixed in SVN, cooker and 2006.0 update packages should follow soon.

Thanks to Scara for spotting this!