Originally Posted by wadecole

I wanted to post a big THANK YOU to gowifi. His advice early in this thread was correct, even though the fix seems a bit illogical. As a database administrator, I use computers all the time, but this one stumped me. My wife's laptop stopped connecting wirelessly, but would still work with a wired connection. She swears she didn't install any new software. She's not a superuser; she doesn't do any tweaking; she mainly just surfs the net and uses email. My laptop still worked fine connected to the same wireless router. I had WPA Personal security. I verified that the passcode was still the same, re-entered the passcode in my wife's profile, still didn't help. Tried removing the wireless entry from her device manager and letting it re-discover... no help. After working with her laptop for 4 hours, I gave up and figured her internal radio must be fried. Went out and bought a new Linksys WPC100 card, installed it, but had the same problem! It was hanging at "Acquiring Network Address". I hard-coded a valid IP address, but still could not get a network connetion. All this time, my laptop was connected fine. Finally read this post. Changed the SSID and disabled security. The wife's laptop connected! Added WPA Personal security back, tried reconnecting the wife's laptop with the WPA passcode, hung at "Acquiring Network Address" again. So I changed to WEP security, and it connects again! Why in the heck would WPA Personal security just randomly stop working on her laptop when she didn't even change any network settings? I'm glad it works with WEP, but am extremely curious about the WPA issue.