Hi all,

I'm suddenly having a problem with wireless access at home via a work
provided laptop (which means I'm limited in what I can do to it).

The hardware involved is:
- IBM Thinkpad T41 (a real one - not Lenovo)
w/ Intel Pro/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI NIC (54G)
XP pro (SP2)
Cisco VPN

- Netgear WG511T PCMCIA NIC (Rev-A 108/Super-G)
driver ver 4.2.2.14 (latest)
utility ver 2.64.33.3 (latest)

- Netgear WGT624 Router

I use the internal NIC when roaming at the office, but at home I like
to use the faster Netgear card. Both worked fine until about a week
ago when IT pushed some kind of upgrade. That same night the troubles
began.

Suddenly the Netgear card hung the computer whenever it was inserted.
I tried the card in a different slot - no hang but it didn't work.
Tried it in another laptop and it worked fine. I tried
uninstalling/reinstalling the Netgear drivers and software after which
the computer hung with the card in either slot.

After a few go rounds, I gave up on Netgear and tried the internal
Intel NIC using Windows wireless configuration (as I use it at work).
It didn't work either - wouldn't even see my network until I disabled
WPA encryption on the router. But even with encryption off it
wouldn't connect to my router. Thinking the Intel NIC didn't like the
Netgear Auto-108 mode, I switched the router first to G-only then to
B-or-G. Still no connection (and no, I don't have address filtering
turned on). I tried to connect to my neighbor who foolishly runs an
open Linksys network - no luck.

Meanwhile, my personal laptop is humming along perfectly content.

Then I remembered that the Netgear drivers were still installed.
Thinking all the gyrations had made a mess, I uninstalled them again
and ran Registry Mechanic to clean up any dribbles left in the
registry. Checked by inserting the card and inspecting with the
device manager.

Still no luck. The internal NIC seems to work fine at the office so
IT won't help me figure it out (not that they could ... I generally
know more than they do and their answer to everything is to re-image
the computer) - but it won't work at home. I can't get the Netgear
card to work at all despite the fact that it works fine in another
computer. I'm afraid the update they pushed a week ago was/is the
source of the problem and re-imaging won't solve it because I'll just
get it again. Not to mention that I'll lose all my customizations and
have to spend hours fixing everything again.

What the heck could have happened? I'm sure there is no malware and
the problem started just hours after a major software update.

Any thoughts?
George
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