Wireless Reloaded!

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For a few days now, the wireless connection via the usb wireless nic on my wife's computer has been down. I do an "ipconfig/all command and it doesn't even show the ip address. I ping the computer's name and it comes up with the loopback address (I have it's name to ip address resolution in the local lmhosts files so this should work). In "available wireless connections" it has "default" and "kblinksys" but not the "WORKGROUP" SSID I created. It's as if the wireless nic doesn't even work but when I go into device manager, it says the device is working properly.

I tried uninstalling the device and it's drivers and reinstalling the thing twice and no go. When I put in the CD that comes with the nic, although it can open various files, it won't open setup.exe. Autoplay won't "autoplay", even when I try manually.

I noodled around with this and that and finally installed some sort of wireless nic monitor made by linksys. Now remember, I have a 10.xx.xx.xx internal network. After multiple tries, configuring and reconfiguring the network ID, suddenly, "WORKGROUP" comes up with a wireless connection but apparently not mine. I did an ipconfig/all and came up with an address on the wireless nic of 169.254.119.221. As memory serves, that's the default network Windows 2000 and XP comes up with when it can't connect to the regular LAN. Also, signal strength is "excellent" and the wireless network is online. Of course, I can't connect to any of the other computers because they're on another network. I check my wireless nic's address via TCP/IP Properties and it's still the 10.xx.xx.xx address I originally put in.

I don't know exactly what I did but at some point, the network went out, then came back in on my network again. So far, it's still going strong and able to access the other nodes in my little LAN. This is the part about troubleshooting I hate. I like solving the problem, I just want to know what went wrong in the first place and how it was fixed. In this case, I don't have the answer to either question. This means it could go out again and give me another giant sized headache.

Through all this, my laptop has performed like a champ. Not so much as a minor hiccup in it's wireless connection. Yeesh.