XP Winbox can't see Airport Extreme Base station

[shumster]

Just moved into my new apartment and installed my ADSL and Airport Extreme Base Station. My powerbook has had no problem seeing and connecting to it (mixed b/g mode, 128bit WEP security) . My wife's Vaio (XP SP2) initially had no problem connecting to it, but yesterday the connection dropped and it no longer even sees the base station in the list of available networks - it can see other unprotected networks in our building.

I have tried connecting it to the base station using an ethernet cable, and it works - what else can I do to get the Vaio to work wirelessly? The only thing I've changed in recent days was the SSID - I changed it from Apple-xxxxx to
NJ home - would the "space" character screw things up?

Are there any settings on the AE Base station that would make it Apple hardware specific?

Thanks all, wife is getting on my back about this! Can't convince her to switch though...but I just got her an iPod mini, so the journey has begun...

 

[shumster]

Update - I removed encryption from the airport, and the vaio can see it now (using a Billionton PCMCIA 802.11b card). If I use the Airport config software for XP, and enable encryption, once the basestation restarts, it disappears from the list of available networks.

And my dad's Thinkpad can't see it either! Please help!

 

[wPod]

when you turn security on are you telling your basestation to be a private network? if so it hides the ID of the basestation. if not, you might try manually configuring your XP boxes and entering in the name of your basestation and entering the WEP informaiton at the same time. I had to do this with an express basestation and a sony viao notebook so its probably the same for the extreme basestation.