[Jackiefrost9]

So i have a dell laptop that came with a later upgrade to vista. well my vista cd got here a week ago so I followed the dell instructions to install it. The first time I installed it there were tons of issues from my bluetooth not working to me not being able to uninstall/inastall anything. I became very sick of that so I just formated and installed it again my own way. Now everything is working perfectly except I cannot connect to my belkin f5d8230-4 pre-n wireless router. There are two other unsecure wireless networks around me and I can connect to those fine and leech of my neighbor's internet. I tried to take the security off of mine but that didn't help. I've tried different channels and SSID's but that didn't change anything. I reset my router and re-did all of the settings, I've tried burst ACK and immediate ACK, "protected mode" on/off, QoS off and on, i've changed wep and wpa incryptions, i've updated the firmware, and nothing in the firewall is blocking it.

I'm still getting to know my way around vista but I've tried turning IPv6 off and I've tried to manually enter all the encryptions and network info. I also uninstalled my network adapter (broadcom 802.11n) and reinstalled it. It was working perfectly on my first install of vista but on the second install it just says "windows cannot connect to network" after trying to connect to it. network diagnostic doesn't help either.
Also, there are no red "!" or yellow "?" in device manager.

this is really frustrating so any input would be greatly apprecited.

[etaf]

do you have anything else connectd to the router at all - perhaps its not the PC
if you can connect to other networks the adapter is working

[Jackiefrost9]

yeah I have a wireless printer and another laptop connected wirelessly and they work fine. my desktop is connected by a wire and it works fine. When I connect the vista machine to it with an ethernet cable it works fine.

[Jackiefrost9]

So i installed the old windows xp driver and now everything works.
pretty weird if you ask me.
thanks for your reply etaf.

[etaf]

clearly a problem with the secruity ability of the vista driver.
vista driver works OK on unsecrure networks but not using secure settings.
however, the XP version works on secure

i guess part of the bugs in vista you often get with MS until SP1 arrives

[Jackiefrost9]

It wasn't black and white with secure and unsecure, I set my network to unsecure and it still wouldn't connect.
It may have just been some legacy vista driver that didn't support pre-n routers probably, because that was the big difference in routers.