wpa_supplicant is below network-manager
It is the part that handles WPA negotiations and encryption and works standalone. You can run in manually and get some more debug information about the stages it is going through.
There are generally two things that can cause errors like that: unsupported hardware (but that is not the case here) and unresponsive hardware. Some laptop manufacturers make it real easy to accidentally turn off the radio.
The Linux WiFi stacks are not very good at picking it back up when the switch is toggled again and you'll have to reboot. In extreme cases, you may actually have to boot Windows to get things back to working order.
