Wireless USB dongle does not connect to router

[lilelvis2000]

I have just come back from a trip to a buddie's company. They guy makes those flavoured vodka shots...doing well.

So I took the WEP key off the BT router and setup the USB dongle and attempted to make the connection. The dongle connected..or so it claimed. The signal bars on its software showed connection status as goog. But, it could not obtain a DHCP lease.

Looking at the router I could not see the connection to the dongle. I could not see its MAC address as a client. MAC filtering is off. A reboot of the router did nothing.

I scratched my head and could not figure out what was going wrong. This stuff usually "just works". Client is now using cat5 to the router.

Any ideas what might be the issue? These dongles worked when my client was next door to me...all be it with a different BT router.

[NickFitz]

Are you absolutely certain the dongle was connected to the router you were looking at, and not some other router on the next floor or something?

[lilelvis2000]

The window which displayed the "available networks" only showed the one in the next room. And the WEP key worked and the dongle reported as "connected" and the PC attempted to obtain a DHCP lease which indicates that it is connected to the proper router.

doing "ipconfig /renew" always timed out.
Both router and dongle support 11b/g and router DHCP is turned on. MAC filtering is off. There is a laptop which connects just fine in the office.

There is some subtle incompatibility somewhere.

????????? Its enough to give me MORE gray hairs.

[thelace]

Having the same (or similar) problem with the eldests XBOX360 at home.

The gear recognises the network, 5 bands of signal.

Absolutely won't connect up, no matter how many times I enter the WEP key

I know that the WEP key is right because I use it with my phone, laptop and the youngests PS3.

Customer Services = Chocolate Teapot

[voodooflux]

Anything in the Windows Event Log about a DHCPNACK error?

[pmeswani]

The window which displayed the "available networks" only showed the one in the next room. And the WEP key worked and the dongle reported as "connected" and the PC attempted to obtain a DHCP lease which indicates that it is connected to the proper router.

doing "ipconfig /renew" always timed out.
Both router and dongle support 11b/g and router DHCP is turned on. MAC filtering is off. There is a laptop which connects just fine in the office.

There is some subtle incompatibility somewhere.

????????? Its enough to give me MORE gray hairs.

Are you sure you are using WEP and not WPA? Sorry, have to ask as some people get those 2 confoosed for some reason. Have you deleted all the wireless cached profiles on the laptop and retried?

[lilelvis2000]

Anything in the Windows Event Log about a DHCPNACK error?

I'm not sure what I would do with that piece of information. I didn't check that. If I do ipconfig /renew it times out.

[DiscoStu]

I had a similar problem with a friend's laptop. Turned out to be a problem with the TCP/IP stack (although I can't understand why it would find an IP address from a wired connection but not a wireless one).

I used the fix detailed here.

[voodooflux]

I'm not sure what I would do with that piece of information. I didn't check that. If I do ipconfig /renew it times out.

Just trying to narrow things down - there look to be a few people reporting that issue with a BT router.

[lilelvis2000]

I had a similar problem with a friend's laptop. Turned out to be a problem with the TCP/IP stack (although I can't understand why it would find an IP address from a wired connection but not a wireless one).

I used the fix detailed here.

I'll mention that to my buddy. They don't know anything about computers and networking is not my forte...but when they were next door to us they let us use their broadband gratis...so I owe them.

I'm sure they've put the cat5 in by now so hopefully the issues are all gone.

I don't use wireless in my office but every other place I've setup a wireless LAN "it just worked".

The dongles did not work with the standard Windows wireless configuration control panel - alarm bells!. It used its own (XPC something I think). Was crap I must say. Very hard to setup the WEP key and the WPA didn't work at all (Remember BT routers output two SSID one for the PC which uses WEP and one for phones which uses WPA).

These BT routers do suck. thank god I went with BeThere.