I think that perhaps the level of hype about how easy it is to crack WEP is getting pretty high. This is an example from the AirSnort forum:

I got AirSnort 02.1.b to crack a 40 bit key after collecting 3693 interesting packets out of a total of just over 10,000,000 encrypted packets. The 40 bit crack breath was set at 12.

It took 6 hours to generate the packets, by running approx 250 concurrent PINGs on a W2K Pro client station.

The PING (ping -t-f 192.168.1.1) targeted a Linksys AP - model BEFW1154_v2 (firmware 1.42.7).

The W2K client station used an Orinoco Gold card in a PCI adapter (firmware 7.28).

The capture machine ran RedHat Linux 7.3 on a Pentium 3 - 500 Mhz, using a Cisco Aironet 350 PCI card (firmware 4.25.30).

At these firmware levels, both the Orinoco and the Linksys AP generate sequential IV numbers. Before starting the Airsnort capture, I reloaded the firmware on both devices, so the IVs started out initialized to 00:00:00.

So to succeed with a short key took 6 hours of fairly intimate internal access to the network (including 250 concurrent sets of pinging to generate some nice predictable traffic!)