Are you fully patched? There are some wireless-specific update thingies for XP. I've encountered the behaviour you're experiencing many times, and it's either patches or a misconfigured router/connection.
Yep, fully patched windows, and I double checked to make sure I had the proper drivers. Only thing I can think of is possible uninstalling and reinstalling the TCP/IP protocols.
If you do an ipconfig/release and ipconfig/renew in the command prompt what error do you get?
No Error, it just takes forever and a day to renew the IP (it releases just fine). After it comes up, the same error comes up in windows, 'Limited or no connectvity' "You might not be able to access the Internet or some network resources. This problem occured because the network did not assign a network address to this computer."
The following is what comes up when going for details, or command lining ipconfig:
IP Address: 169.254.78.219
Subnet Mask: 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway:
DNS Server:
WINS Server:
Are you connecting to a dynamic IP-address-using router? I seem to recall something about static and dynamic IP addresses and ensuring that your PC supported dynamic IP addy's if that's the way your router is set up. Unfortunately I can't recall what it is that needs configuring in that way, or whether it would cause that problem. Sorry can't be more useful.
The router is a Linksys wrt45g wireless router. It uses both dynamic and static IP's, and yes, my laptop is configured for dynamic IP usage (my network at home uses the same router, with dynamic IPs). The router works fine everyone else, just not for my laptop.
The same goes with another router and wireless network on site, I was able to connect to it when I first came onto this jobsite - after I attempted to reconnect to the router, I was getting the same error as I do with my work router, which is why I'm lead to beleive it is not a router problem, but something in my laptop.
Is DHCP enabled in the router? Use one of your friend's machines to check if you don't have a cat5 cable to run from your machine to the router. Drivers up to date? I doubt its a MAC filtering issue because you wouldn't even be able to try to connect. It would instantly reject you. I would seriously double-check those drivers, and see if theres also a firmware update for your NIC. Also, make sure powersaving mode for your NIC is turned off.
Latest drivers have been installed to the laptop, uninstalled and reinstalled....so I've pretty much covered that base. No powersaving mode on this NIC, it's either off or on, no inbeween (Toshiba actually did something half decent on this model laptop....)
Is your wireless connection firewalled?
Negative, once I started having these problems, I made sure to deactivate all firewalls on the laptop, temporarily, until the issue was figured out.
In addition to checking the drivers and firmware for the NIC, you should check that there are no conflicts between Windows wireless networking management and whatever software came with the wireless card. You have to use one or the other, you can't use both at the same time.
Then you need to check that the wireless card and the router are compatible. Some wireless cards simply refuse to work with certain routers, or have compatibility requirements to the tune of "must have card and router from same manufacturer", especially if you're using the software that came with the card to manage the connection.
Case in point a couple of weeks ago at work: I get a ZyXel wireless router to configure, and a wireless NIC by some completely third rate manufacturer that can't even be bothered to put essential information like model numbers on the card. After a lot of digging, it turned out that the NIC's own software would only work with a router from the same manufacturer, so I had to use the Windows network management to get it to connect. Or more properly, I watched and learned as the more experienced guy helped me do all that shit. It was a very educational experience.
Edi
The card uses Windows Networking to manage the connections, so no problems there. The router and internal NIC for the laptop is capatable, I've connected to a score of other Linksys routers of the same model (in fact, I've previously been connected to this same router approx 2 months back when on another jobsite). So I know it's not that the router and the network card are incompatable...