I have a newish (two months old I think) laptop that came installed with Vista Home Premium. My router is a Hawking Tech that I haven't had problems with, other devices connect wirelessly without a problem (for the most part, the PS3 was even a pain in the ass to get connected wired). Last night was the first time I tried to connect the laptop to the network wirelessly and I had all kinds of problems. No matter what I tried, Vista complained that it couldn't connect because of the incorrect network password.

I checked the password on a wired computer, retyped it a few times, and verified it in clear text both on the router and on the laptop. I tried the different security protocols, WPA2 (both AES and TKIP(?)), WPA, and even WEP. Everytime Vista said it couldn't connect because of the incorrect password. I went through and created the connection manually specifying the security protocol and got the same result.

Wondering if there was an issue with the signal (even though it was listed as 'good' on the WiFi Catcher), I brought out the iPod Touch, told it to forget my network, and then proceeded to set it up and type in the same password as on the laptop and it connected without any issues.

Checking Google I found one other result that sounded similar, but the thread was teaching the original poster (CubsGirl or something) the difference between the router password and the wireless password. Has anybody seen this before or have any suggestions I haven't tried?

Thanks for any advice!
Tim

Having just returned again from England and Europe, where my Linux notebook worked flawlessly with all sorts of wireless hosts, here's my suggestion:

There are two forms for a wireless network key: hexadecimal pairs, versus ascii passphrase.

Perhaps your software is defaulting to the wrong format?

At our first B&B in Britain, the key offered to us was a short string of uppercase letters and numeric digits. It was *very* ambiguous as to whether this was intended as a hexadecimal key or a passphrase.

After much experimentation, it was determined to be a 40-bit WEP hexadecimal key -- though oddly our wireless software wouldn't accept it as such until I switched all of the uppercase letters into lowercase letters.

Cheers

I'll have to try that. Vista didn't offer a choice between Hex and ASCII, but the router does. I'll try it in Hex and see if it works.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Although Mark's suggestion is the best one to try first, something about your post gave me pause. It was this here:



By default, Vista doesn't offer you those options. It gives you a single box in which to enter the passkey, and then does the necessary trickery to handshake with the router in the correct format.

The fact that you were being prompted for those options tells me that you were using the wireless adapter's bundled third party connection manager.

Ew. Ick. Bad.

Turn it off, check its little box that says "use windows to manage my wireless networks", deinstall it, do whatever it takes to get rid of it. You should be using only the drivers for the adapter and the Windows features to connect to the network.

While you're at it, make sure that you're using Vista-native drivers for the wireless adapter. Go to the command prompt and type:

NETSH WLAN SHOW DRIVERS

It will give you the information about the wireless adapter. About 1/3 of the way down the list, you're looking for:



If it says "Legacy" there instead of "Native", it means you're running a Windows XP driver under Vista, and that also can be a problem. Find a Vista native driver from the adapter's manufacturer.

I tried for a while to connect to the network in the "Connect to a Network" dialog, which doesn't allow for the security protocol to be specified, it just asks for the password. It does specify the protocol in the pop-up box if you over over the wireless signal dialog, so I was guessing it was correctly working. When that didn't work, I went into the 'Manually Create a Connection' to specify all the information, which includes the security protocol. I changed the security protocol on both the router and the laptop to see if I could find one that they liked.

This was all Vista's native networking tools. I'd have to dig around to see what the adapter's software is.

I'll take a look at what the NETSH WLAN SHOW DRIVERS gives me when I get home.

MAC address filter

Ah, OK, good. Locate that profile you created and delete it, because any one of those settings could be wrong now. For future attempts, go back to the ordinary simple connection box, where all it does is prompt you for the passkey.

As was suggested in the prior response in this thread, make sure your router isn't doing any MAC address filtering.

Also make sure that if your network password contains letters, enter them in the same case (uppercase or lowercase) as it is shown on the router's configuration screen. These things are case sensitive usually.

Check to see if your router can get firmware upgrades, and make sure it's running the latest firmware.

No MAC address filtering is on, I verified that when I was checking the password in clear text. I also verified that the password was being typed in properly, with case sensitivity. I went so far as to type it out on my desktop, copy and pasted that to the router, then put it on a flash drive and copied the file to the laptop to copy and paste into the password field. That didn't work either, which is when I busted out the iPod Touch to make sure something in the same area could connect to the network (the Wii is on the other side of the room so I figured there could've been a difference in interference/signal strength/etc).

I try to avoid MAC filtering since we've seen in the past how easy it is to spoof that stuff.

I just had that conversation with a friend who does MAC filtering and WPA encryption. I tried to argue that the MAC filtering was like tissue paper in front of the vault door of WPA. (Tissue paper thats a huge pain in the ass to maintain.) He disagreed. Sigh.

I used to do both: MAC filtering and WPA encryption, until I saw how easy it was to spoof a MAC address, too.

While Mac addresses are easy to spoof, don't you have to guess the correct one to spoof?

No. Many wireless adapters have the capability to sniff in promiscuous mode these days. No guesswork required. Just sniff and look at the packets in the air.

Not even "these days". Pretty much since 802.11 existed. (not a, b, g or n, but the base wireless standard way back when)

Your analogy of tissue paper I think is still too strong. MAC filtering adds exactly 0 security to a wireless network. It's simply a feel good thing, much like the TSA.

Point taken.

Oh, how can you say that? TSA is doing a wonderful job. I feel so much safer now that I know that no terrorists are getting on the airplane carrying cans of soda pop or (God forbid!) a nail clipper!

tanstaafl.

Personally, I felt safer when they were dealing with the (very real and not at all based on movie physics) threat of liquid binary explosives by confiscating all liquids and dumping them into a common vessel.

Oh, I was thinking of this TSA, and not that TSA.

(Tries to get his name back off the mandatory annoy the hell out of you list before his 3 flights in the next 2 weeks).

There was a thread here (last year, maybe the year before?) that was on how to get free WiFi at an airport by spoofing MACs and using that to get on the network. All you need is WireShark (I think that was the new name of Ethereal) and away you go.

Yeah, that was my thread.

I thought so, but I didn't want to attribute it incorrectly.