I’m afraid that question is a bit too technical for me!
Here’s what I can tell you. The router is a 3com 3CRWDR100A-72. We’ve
installed the latest firmware available from the 3com site, dated 26 April
2007.
We’ve been using this set-up to access the Internet, with WPA-PSK encryption
between the router and any PCs connecting to it, for about 3 years, with no
problems at all. Both the PCs we’ve used until now have been running Windows
XP. With our existing laptop, it was a simple matter of scanning for wireless
networks in the vicinity and entering the necessary WPA passphrase, and the
laptop then logged on to the router automatically every time it was booted
up. The router automatically allocates an IP address to any machine
connecting to it.
The new machine, running Windows Vista, finds the router with no problem and
recognises that it’s a secure network. We try to connect and are asked for
the passphrase. We enter this, there is a pause, then Vista says that it is
unable to connect. When we ‘analyse the problem’, we are told “wireless
authentication failed because of a timeout”.
If we switch off the WPA encryption on the router and go through the same
process, Vista connects to the router and we are able to access the Internet.
Therefore, it seems clear that Vista is unable to handle some aspect of
communication with the router using WPA encryption. The router does not offer
WPA2 encryption, and obviously we don’t want to operate an unsecured network,
so we can’t see what alternative there is. This is a brand new laptop, with
Vista preinstalled, so we can’t understand why it fails to work with what is
obviously an extremely common set-up.
We’ve done some research on the Web and it appears that many people are
having exactly the same problem, but nobody seems to have a definitive
solution. We’ve updated the drivers for the wireless network card in the
laptop, with no effect. We’ve also tried the Microsoft Hotfix described in
KB935222, but that didn’t work either. We thought about trying the registry
change mentioned in KB928233, but decided that it wasn’t relevant, since we
can connect to the router without encryption, so the problem is not that
Vista can’t obtain an IP address from the router.
In short, we’re at a complete loss as to what else to do!
"Barb Bowman" wrote: