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Win XP wilreless networking prob

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puffpio

Golden Member
I have a laptop with Win XP and all the patches applied via windowsupdate and the wireless update patch.

I have a wireless router with SSID broadcast off and a 128 bit WEP key.
I've tested the setup and it works.

My neighbor has a wireless router w/ SSID broadcast on and no WEP key. But I think he does some kind of MAC address filtering because although my laptop connects to his network, I never get any incoming packets and nothing works.

Now here's the problem, my laptop tries to connect to his network and never to my network!!! I even moved his network down in the wireless settings and made sure mine was above his. Still, it never connects to mine and only to his!!! As a result I can't use my wireless network!! What to do???????

We have different SSID's
 
Sounds like the reason windows is choosing his AP is because it can't establish a connection to yours? Are you sure you setup WEP right on your router? You matched the bit lengths and keys, etc?

One thing you should be able to do is to prevent windows from automatically establishing connections to access points and/or other peers. I've seen this in one of the menus, but don't have a computer with a wireless config in front of me now.
 
Manually add your AP in the preferred networks area, then click on Only connect to preferred networks. The reason you don't receive packets from him is you have WEP running. You can associate to his AP but won't authenticate, thus getting no downstream data. If he had MAC filtering on you wouldn't associate to it.
 
my AP is in my preferred network..there is no option to "only connect to preferred networks" there is an advanced option that says "automatically connect to non-preferred networks" but that is not checked.

I have WEP on my AP and the key is correctly inputted for that particular network. I have no idea why this is happening...
 
I hadn't seen this behavior until recently, after reading about it as a matter of fact. Supposedly, Microsoft doesn't think that turning off the SSID broadcast is a "legitimate" security measure. So they may have designed their wireless networking software to deliberately "prefer" a network which broadcasts the SSID over one which doesn't -- regardless of instructions to the contrary (as in don't associate with non-preferred networks). I had set up a number of small wireless networks with SSID broadcast turned off as one of the security measures. Some of these were within broadcast range of other networks with SSID broadcast turned on, and the clients on these networks didn't seem inclined to try to connect to the other networks. I don't know whether that was due to security settings on the other networks or a difference in equipment / drivers or what. But I started seeing this silly behavior after I read about it (maybe on Anandtech???). In those cases turning the SSID broadcast on has always killed the behavior.

But, of course, there's always a chance that you're seeing something else. This was just my first guess after reading the posts so far. I'm thinking the behavior that Microsoft intended needs to be rethought, and I hope we see a change in SP2.

Ernie
 
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