SP4 breaks WIFI

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ted Carnevale
  • Start date Start date
T

Ted Carnevale

Prodded by the (probably warranted) hysteria about rpc
exploits and other notorious security holes, I just
installed SP4. Among other things, this broke VPN
(par for the course it seems), but also it made the
Netgear MA311 (802.11b) PCI card in my desktop PC
unusable. The driver is still present, and the
hardware is supposedly "functioning properly", but
I can no longer turn the transmitter on. Netgear's
WWW site says nothing about this, and it doesn't
appear in the euphemistically short list of SP4
"issues" that MicroSloth admits to. Surprisingly,
although I also installed SP4 on my laptop PC, its
MA401 (PCMCIA card) still works properly.

Anyone else seen SP4 interfere with a PCI WIFI card,
and know of a simple fix, other than reinstalling the
driver (which I don't know will work either).

--Ted
 
Have you tried rekeying your WEP password and checking your SSID? I had
to do this when updating drivers for the card.
 
Airman said:
Have you tried rekeying your WEP password and checking your SSID? I had
to do this when updating drivers for the card.
Click to expand...

Interesting suggestions, but even if the WEP key
and SSID were perfectly correct, it is doubtful
that this would fix the problem I'm seeing: the
card's _transmitter_ is off and the icon in the
tray won't bring up its menu of choices that
include turning the xmtr on.

Besides, I haven't updated the card's driver, and
the driver's GUI shows that the SSID is unchanged
(there's no way to tell if the WEP key has been
altered, short of seeing what happens when it is
retyped).

That said, I'll try what you suggest out of sheer
desperation. If it fails, maybe I'll have to
reinstall the driver.

--Ted
 
Have you tried reinstalling the card's driver?

I recently had the same problem on a Thinkpad with
integrated WiFi running Windows 2000 with SP3. Note I did
not upgrade to SP4. Reinstalling my driver solved the
issue.
 
Ted said:
Interesting suggestions, but even if the WEP key
and SSID were perfectly correct, it is doubtful
that this would fix the problem I'm seeing: the
card's _transmitter_ is off and the icon in the
tray won't bring up its menu of choices that
include turning the xmtr on.

Besides, I haven't updated the card's driver, and
the driver's GUI shows that the SSID is unchanged
(there's no way to tell if the WEP key has been
altered, short of seeing what happens when it is
retyped).

That said, I'll try what you suggest out of sheer
desperation.
Click to expand...

Well, darn if it didn't work. Temporarily. That is,
if I enter the WEP key, and click on the Apply button,
presto! the connection comes to life. But if I
reopen the systray's tool for this thing, and then
just click on its OK button without doing anything
else, the connection breaks. Manually typing the
WEP key again restores the connection.

So either the driver needs to be reinstalled, or
updated (if available), or I'm out what I paid
for the card.

--Ted
 
Jason said:
Have you tried reinstalling the card's driver?
Click to expand...

Not yet. A chance to install something is a
chance to break something. Gathering info
right now.

--Ted
 
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