Vista - Using your PC and Vista to share the Internet connection with an Xbox360 - Problems

First, apologies if this is in the wrong bit, couldnt find anything that looked like an area to post this.

OK, so like many im trying to share out my PC at home with my Xbox360 to save paying out the extortion that is the wireless adapter.

Setup is - Standard IBM style PC, built in NIC running Windows Ultimate in 32bit mode. PC has a USB wireless dongle attached which picks up wireless feed from a netgear router situated downstairs. XBox360 is standard, non-chipped etc, settings as per factory.

What I have done - I have connected both using a standard Cat5 ethernet cable, both in straight through and in crossover mode and done the following steps for both.

1. Connected and turned on both PC and XBox360
2. Gone into network sharing centre on the PC
3. PC has found a local network connection and also my wireless connection
4. Wireless connection is set to

Automatic configure IP
Automatic configure DNS

Will not allow me to share, comes up with an error simply stating that

An error occured while tryin to setup connection sharing

5. Local area set to

Automatic configure IP
Automatic configure DNS

I can set ICS on and this then starts altering the IP addressing (here is where it gets messy)

6. At this point my IP address goes from the one assigned by my router to something in the 169 range (meaning dodgy ether connection) and my connection to the internet drops. Reason im told is that there are two pc's with the same IP address in an error message. I do an ipconfig from the pc and find that both the wireless lan and ethernet lan connection's now have the same 169 scheme address - wierd.

this now meens no connection to internet, and still cant connect to Xbox360 (in the system panel on the 360 i do the test connection, it says it fails to find an IP address).

I have done the following -

1. Set static IP addresses to

Router (it was set to 192.168.0.1 which I believe ICS pushes to have, so it might conflict). change the address to a new number in the range, same scope.

Set manual IP address, Mask and DNS on both the PC and XBox360 again within the scope of the router DNS table.

Still get same issue, PC looses internet connection, XBox360 dont see PC.

Now I was lead to believe it was simply plug and go by many websites, including microsofts own website. So im guessing im doing something wrong here.

How can the Wireless and NIC get the same IP when ICS is turned on ? I thought they where seperate entities controlled by Windows ??

Why if the XBox is given feed it doesnt see nada ? Is the ICS setting correct, or am i missing something ?

What I could do with right now is some help from someone who has done the same thing, but with Vista rather than XP which seems to be the favourable platform OS to do this with.

Running a cable btw is not an option...no way to route it nice and neat unfortunately, it would stick out like a sore thumb.


Help

Any guidance is greatly appreciated

im not sure if you have to bridge connections or anything however you do have to the pc set to a minimum of standby of sleep mode for your xbox to be able to connect to the internet.... if the pc is fully should down then the network cards are completely turned off and thus no connectin

hmmm not sure how u would go about briding connections in vista when i think about it
may be this link will help
Bridge Network Connections In Vista ~ IT Professionals