Lets not start again Sek there's nothing wrong with the hardware or it's firmware it's entirely Windows 7 that is the issue and it's "get your hands off" approach to supporting networking

I have noticed with WIndows 7 and Wifi for my 1 computer at least the wifi as to be installed prior to boot-up and has problem if you try to plug and play it once already booted up. works just fine for my 1 windows vista machine if i boot with the wifi already attached though

On my Windows 7 box, the wireless adapter would not work if I installed the device drivers from the manufacturer (Linksys).

I had to install the adapter when the machine was shut down and there were no device drivers installed. Then boot up the machine and let Windows install it's generic wireless drivers. Then the wireless adapter worked fine.

Hi David Autumns,

I had a network problem just last week. I doubt that my experience will be useful . . . but here it is anyway.

I changed my firewall several times, trying to find a free one that worked well. (I settled for PC Tools Free Firewall.) Unfortunately, I managed to mess up my network connection and forgot how I had set it up the previous year. I KNEW how I had done it! (Yeah, I was misremembering and dead wrong - - sigh.) I quickly grew frustrated and gave up. After several days, I called Belkin the customer service representative and obeyed his instructions, deleting the Belkin software and reinstalling it. I gave the service agent the wrong information, believing it was right. Even so, he stubbornly insisted that I needed to check the router software, not the Belkin dongle utilities. I thanked him when we decided we had reached an impasse. A few minutes later, thinking about his argument, I started looking over the Cisco router utility, suddenly remembered what I had done the previous year, and quickly set up my network connection.

But I am sure that this is not helpful. However, there was one peculiar problem when I reinstalled the Belkin software. I can no longer remember the exact sequence of events, but I had to do 2 things. 1) I had to unplug the dongle and replug it to get the Belkin USB device driver attached to the dongle. 2) In Windows XP, I had to right-click on My Computer, right-click on Manage in the pop-up window, double-click on the Computer Management - System Tools - Device Manager, then I expanded the 'Network Adapters' listing looking for Belkin **** under it to select, but it was not there. Eventually I saw the very next subheading was 'Other Adapters' had a device named F5D***, which by then I knew was the Model Number of the Belkin Adapter. I clicked on it (?right-click? double-click? ) and got a pop-up saying that it was disabled. I selected the Enable command, and the pop-up window changed to show 'Belkin F5D***' under the Network Adapters. Not having Belkin in the name when it was listed under 'Other Adapters' certainly slowed me down for a few minutes.

I doubt that this will prove helpful, but it was a minor puzzle that stumped me for 10 minutes or so.

Lawrence