[OT] Wireless problems

Check the card hasn't been disturbed by the removal and refitting of HDD? Check the ariel?

Download the latest drivers you can find for the network card.

Failing that, dunno, sorry.

Uninstall and re-install the wifi drivers.

Yeah, done done and done, unfortunately

Fair play, I've uninstalled the card in the device manager, rebooted and let the thing install itself, but I've not tried uninstalling the drivers. I'll give that a go tomorrow after he's gone to school.

Silly question, but have you disabled Windows Firewall?

This is normally set to on as part of an install of XP... well, Service Pack

If it isn't this, where is it telling you the device is firewalled... in the Device Manager?

Finally, what make / model is the wireless card?

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

check norton if your running that and windows firewall. also log into the router and manually add the computers ip. if that fails try uninstalling the wifi and reboot and then reinstall it

Yeah it's the same regardless of whether the firewall is enabled or disabled; the word 'firewalled' disappears but still no networks are detected

It worked fine connecting to the internet on SP2 though

No, in network connections. The connection has a red cross as it's disabled, and reports 'disconnected, firewalled'. It is enabled though

BT Voyager 1040

Nah, it's running nothing, just a completely bare install of XP, patched up to SP3 and the latest drivers for the wifi card

It sounds like the authentication has changed and is not matching your router. Is it set to wep, wpa etc and does it match your router ? Have you 1st tried Netstumbler to confirm your wireless adapter actually sees your network and by some strange coincidence it has failed ? Perhaps you will have to go back to basics and reconfigure the network connection? If you have got your router set to hide the "ssid" then you are probably advised to turn 'hide' off for a short time while you reconnect and disable security too. Once the router is visible and security turned off, at least your wireless card if it is working, should now see the network and connect. If ok then set the wireless protocol on your router and laptop along with your security network key and try again. If ok re hide the ssid on router and confirm laptop still connects. You should be able to check that the router also sees your connected laptop in its client list.

Gio

I had my PC running happily and talking to my RISC OS machines until I fitted SP3. Then it wouldn't. I'm using net bios over TCP/IP for this and no settings have changed. Doing a system restore to before installing SP3 got things going again. Ah well.

FWIR, it was the advice given in the notes on MS support KB article about some devices that stop working after applying SP3.