Original Post
Well you'll prolly get a laugh outta this... i was installing a new sound card (sound blaster 5.1 :)) and about halfway through installing the drivers, my system crashed randomly. well because it was installing drivers at the time of the crash, and since it was on a fat32 partition, many of my drivers got currupted. it was mostly just the sound card drivers, but somehow the driver for my cd-rw also got currupted. so it kinda put me in a sticky situation... tried to get windows to repair it but it refused to awknoledge 'hey, my drivers are currupt, i could just redownload them, but no, i'll just drive my user crazy.' well after getting fed up trying to get win xp (pro) to repair itself, i just decided i'd reformat. kinda needed it to, the bitrot was starting to get a bit bad. so i reformated my drive, reinstalled win98 then upgraded to xp (only have the winxp pro upgrade). i installed my wireless linksys 802.11G drivers, and it detects my wireless network fine, but it refuses to connect. even worse, it doesn't give me any kind of error message, just silently fails and reminds me that it can detect the access point (i guess its proud of that?). its not a range issue, the computer is about 5 feet away from the access point (just through a wall or two, but i've always had a full strength signal). well i've been straining myself for the past three hours trying to figure out why it refuses to connect. i disabled all wireless encryption and authentications, double checked the settings against my wireless laptop (which works fine), and even tried sticking a rabbits foot inside my computer. no luck. anybody had this problem before? more importantly, anyone know how to resolve it, or at least get my wireless card to divulge more information on why its failing to connect?