Anyone have WinXP's wireless configuration just stop working?

MrBond

Diamond Member
Feb 5, 2000
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I use my laptop on four different networks, usually switching between at least two a day. I was running Windows 2000 since that's the OS that my Thinkpad shipped with, but one of the networks started using SecureW2 authentication, and I had to upgrade to WinXP before I could use it.

Prior to this upgrade, I bought GlobalSoft's Multi-Network Manager because it made switching between wireless networks/printers really easy in Windows 2000. I carried it over with me to XP and used it for a while, before it started giving me problems connecting to one of the networks.

I uninstalled it and switched to XP's built-in network manager. It worked almost as well, except I just had to manually switch printers this time.

The other day, I came home and tried to get onto my WAP here, but Windows couldn't connect to it, despite other devices connecting with no problems. I reinstalled the network card drivers, and everything worked fine.

The next day, I couldn't connect to the WAP at work. I was able to pull in a far away access point (another network I use) and that worked fine. The next day, that wouldn't work either.

I uninstalled/reinstalled the network card over and over (Netgear WAG511T) to no avail. I finally gave up and installed the Netgear SmartWizard program and now everything works fine (except switching from network to network is manual now and I can't use the network with SecureW2 since the Netgear program can't work with it).

I'm afraid the SmartWizard program will stop working too in a couple weeks, so is there any way I can completely uninstall and reinstall my network to try and fix things in WinXP? Anyone ever run into this problem before?