This weekend I've been trying to track down another problem. I recently bought an HP media center pc from Best Buy. It was a display model. Normally I wouldn't touch such a beast but the bonus for buying it was a $600 cash card. Which I used to buy a wide screen monitor and an additional 2GB of ram. It also seems to have qualified for the free Vista upgrade. I just hope free won't be too high a price to pay for Vista.

Any way, the problem seems to be getting it and my laptop to do a few simple things like file share, or even see each other reliably as members of the same windows workgroup.

So far turning off windows firewall (both ends) and disabling nod (both ends) doesn't seem to help. I've got to find that hub I stored away somewhere. And try without using the wireless.

Strangeness includes sometimes seeing the file shares without seeing the computer in the workgroup. Seeing both computers in the workgroup without being able to open them and see the shares. On occassion everything seems to work as it should.

Could all this be related to the distance the HP is away from the AP? The HP's signal strength is low.