I ran into this same problem today. It occurred after I updated pip to the latest version based on a message I saw though perhaps that was just coincidental and I caused this problem in some other way. I do switch back and forth between ESP-IDF versions which normally is not a problem, but at any ra...

The NVS key ap.sndchan get set on every esp_wifi_init but since the value isn't normally changing, it does not write to Flash (low-level Flash code reads the value and compares before doing a write or erasure). However, the NVS keys sta.chan and sta.apinfo are set on every esp_wifi_connect and these...