said by DaveMcLain :

I have an interesting and rather weird problem with my laptop computer. The problem appeared rather suddenly and I'm not sure what to do to fix it properly...

I was at home and my connection suddenly became very unstable. I was using a D-Link DIR-655 router and an Engenius USB adapter which has been an excellent piece for the last year. I messed around with the wireless client trying different settings, I reloaded the drivers, I switched to using Windows management for the connection. I changed routers swapping to a WRT54G V6 with DD-WRT(handy to have some spare equipment). No change. I tried another wireless card in the laptop which was no better. It would connect for a few seconds and then disconnect over and over again. Using a wired connection was just fine as were all of my other wireless devices in the home.

Just for kicks I changed to a static IP address and everything works fine no matter what wireless adapter I use, perfect. Why is it suddenly like this? Why won't automatic DCHP settings no longer work? Any ideas?

I'm just wondering if there wasn't some Windows update that could have changed something with wireless networking. I'm running Windows XP SP3.

said by DaveMcLain :

What's interesting is how it just started doing this for no real reason that I can figure and it'll do it on any AP that I've tested. It's only this machine too with any of the wireless cards that I've tried.

I tried setting the D Link router to G only, made no difference same with the Linksys or Netgear routers that I tested.

So far with it set to static IP I've tested it at home and at work and it's been just fine. Right now at home I have the WRT54G V6 with DD-WRT and at work I have an Engenius outdoor AP with a WRT54G using Tomato firmware as the router.