[Tonberry]

Over the course of the past two weeks, I have seen three laptops with this problem.

They have an Intel Proset Wireless Card and are running the Intel Proset Wireless Utility. They cannot connect to a secure wireless network (this is a legal connection with a valid WEP key in all cases), but they can connect to open, unsecure wireless networks.

The following actions have been taken on all machines:

• Uninstalled the Intel Proset Wireless Utility.
• Reinstalled the device driver for the wireless card without extra software.
• Switched to the Windows Wireless Utility.
• Connected to the designated secured wireless network with valid WEP passphrase. (Does not connect or pull IP address)
• Ran Dial-a-fix.
• Ran Anti-virus and Spybot S&D.
• Installed Firefox.
• Hardwire connection to router.

After each step, I attempted to re-connect to the wireless networks with no luck.

All systems are running Windows XP Pro and all systems connecting to different routers and different secure networks (one laptop is in another city).

Each of these secure networks has completely different routers/passkeys/locations. They are unrelated with the exception of being secured.

Any help would be appreciated.

[TheEmperor]

We have run into this as a known bug in the Intel wireless software. Unless they have fixed it in the latest build you will be stuck using Windows to manage the wireless connection.
Ok, I checked it with my laptop which has the latest build. It still fails. I have to use the Windows Wireless Config to connect to my secure wireless. Let me know if you find any other solution. Our SOP is to uninstall the Intel Wireless tool from all of the laptops we get.

[Tonberry]

Only one laptop out of the three has successfully connected to a secure network since the failure. This laptop worked after performing a repair installation of Windows XP and re-installing the hardware drivers.

Unfortunately, this is not a very efficient fix, and we have no way of knowing whether the Windows system files or the driver itself are the problem. I know that as long as part of the utility is installed (including the part containing the driver), no secure wireless networks will authenticate and pull an IP address.

One fix I have not been able to try: uninstall the utility and uninstall the device driver for the wireless card completely, then re-install the driver without using the Setup.exe installer for the driver download. I was using Intel's uninstaller to remove and reinstall the driver, but using the device manager to manually search for the driver (thereby leaving the utility off of the computer entirely) may be a better approach.

[TheEmperor]

As I said, that has been our solution. Remove the Intel utility and install only the driver and it will work.