The computer (yesterday) was a Vaio with built-in WiFi. Which first had to be enabled by turning on the external WiFi switch.

I didn't try typing in the password in Hex. I'm pretty confident it wouldn't work though. It also mentioned the length required when typing Hex digits and I'm pretty sure it was 26. One byte for each of the 13 characters it wanted. My Password is an entire sentence, though it's less than the 64 characters/bytes allowed for WPA.

Tom, thanks for the tip about SP3. I will go as far as mentioning this to my other friend as it could be the sole reason she's unable to connect her Windows machine to the network.