My wireless network password is two words with an ampersand (&) between them. iwconfig won't accept the password, and the error messages suggest the ampersand is confusing it. (Sorry for the awkward way of quoting my command, but I shouldn't display either the essid or password.) I entered:
The system responded:Obviously, the ampersand confused the system. So I tried the same password enclosed in single quotation marks and then tried it again enclosed in double quotation marks. For both, I got this result:
Is this all because my password contains an ampersand? I don't know what else it would be, because I'm typing the command exactly as my source says (http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/14/con...-command-line/
I am not the administrator of my network, and therefore can't change the password to remove the ampersand. There's no possibility I have the wrong password; I know it too well. I added "s:" before the password because the website says to do that for an ASCII password, which mine is.

May be you can try to enclose your password with double quotes ("") for the key option like EDIT: Sorry I see you have already tried it.

Try escaping the & i.e.

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It didn't work.

I want to try some distro variations that don't include an automatic network connection manager, so I need to solve this problem. (At the moment, I have in mind specifically the "standard" version of Debian Live.)

I haven't found anything other then quotes and escaping if special characters exist. There could be other options but you may have to convert the passphrase to hex.

Okay, I'm looking up ascii-to-hex converters. I guess I never supposed iwconfig might not convert the ascii for me.

have you tried setting the password in your rc.wireless.conf file
or make a plain text file with just the password in it and redirect the file to the command

iwconfig wlan0 essid ****************** key s:<password.txt

Looking for my rc.wireless.conf file...