wireless router hijinks

[eestlinc]

so my roomates and I bought a netgear 108 mbps wireless router, came home and set it up. My computer (macbook) connects fine with no problems, but neither of my roommates (who have fairly new pc laptops) can connect wirelessly at all. We've tried WPA, WEP, and no security and they cannot connect in any way. I've changed the broadcast channel and swtiched from "g and b" to "108 mbps" and back to no avail.

The only thing I can really think of is maybe their antivirus software is blocking the router, but I don't really know how to fix that. Anyone have this problem before?

[Yamaneko]

Unless the antivirus has a port blocker or some such feature, I doubt that's interfering. Have they turned off the Windows firewall? Do you know what kind of wireless cards they have?

[eestlinc]

one of my roommates has a LAN-express AS IEEE 802.11g miniPCI Adapter

not sure about the other, but his computer is a thinkpad he just bought last week that is one year old.

[Raistlin]

Wireless routers are the tools of Satan.

And they can't connect directly (hard-wired) either? My desktop PC couldn't connect even directly when I was setting up my wireless network, and it turned out that the internal network card was messed up, because it wasn't even getting a new IP address from the router.

[eestlinc]

they can connectfine with an ethernet cable, just the wireless communication is messed up.

[Endless]

Do their laptops see the wifi router? (take a screenshot) If not, does it see other routers usually? Does the router have MAC access control enabled?

Also, what router model is it?

[eestlinc]

It's a netgear 108mbps. did not turn on MAC address verification. They can see the router but not connect. Actally one of my roommates spend an hour on the phone with IBM tech support and after disabling a bunch of windows crap and installing some new wireless card drivers it works.