Mark McIntyre <markmcintyre@spamcop.net> hath wroth:

>The difficulty for John and I is that Windows uses this tiny
>notification to mean a large number of very different things.
>Apparently Microsoft thought it would confuse users to actually tell
>them the precise problem. So the red X by itself doesn't really tell
>you very much.

Actually, Windoze does a truely horrible job of diagnostics. I the
case of WZC (wireless zero config), it's also WZD (wireless zero
diagnostics). There's no obvious indication at what stage of the
connection process, the connection has failed (driver, SSID detection,
SSID selection, AP association, encryption key exchange, DHCP,
filters, authentication, and application).

On the other end of the scale, WZC does have the ability to generate
diagnostic output.
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328601>
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/wlansupp.mspx>
The problem is that it generates huge amounts of diagnostic output,
much of which is difficult to understand. Feast or famine, I guess.
The good news is that it was apparently designed for NDIS5 driver
debugging and has been very useful for convincing at least one
manufactory that their driver needs some more work.

IE7 also includes some diagnostics:
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/russel_diagnostics.mspx>
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326155/>
which have allowed some of my customer to perform amazing amounts of
damage and difficult to recover registry changes. My favorite
customer comment was "I fixed the problem, but nothing works".

Note that I'm not suggesting that Alan attempt to use these tools at
this point.

>The answer is that possibly your router cannot take the load of two
>laptops. This probably means the router is defective, and you need to
>try a different unit.

Good point. The Dlink DSL-G624T is a mystery to me because it's only
sold in the UK. I also don't like all in one modem-router-wireless
conglomerations because they are difficult to replace sub-systems. If
you search Google for "DSL-G624T problem", a substantial number of
hits and problems appear. A clue might be the list of maximum
wireless connections found at:
<http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,156/>
See chart under "Maximum Simultaneous Connections". The DSL-G624T is
not listed, but the chart does illustrate that there are some bottom
of the line products with some severe connection limitations. Since
we know that MAC address filtering is being used, my guess is that the
use of such ACL's tends to reduce most performance results.

>The common factor is that both Thinkpads connect to the router and
>negotiate access to the internet through it. So try a different
>router....

That would be too easy.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558