Wifi Problem

[bigcaesar]

Hello to you all,
Apart from my introduction, this is my first post.
Unfortunately it is a bit strange.
As I said in my introduction I work in tech support and the other day I was visiting one of our sales offices and encountered a strange wifi problem.
The thing is that some of the laptops with wifi are working and some are not. They are a mix of Dells and Thinkpads all with XP Pro.
I have the same mix of pcs that are presenting me with the problem.
The problem is that although all the laptops are seeing the AP, and showing as successfully connected the laptops that are not working cannot communicate with any of the network resources eg email, internet etc. These pcs cannot even ping the AP. The same pcs are working fine using cabled ethernet.
I was up against the clock so I have not reset the AP yet. I was just wondering if anyone has seen this problem before. Please let me know if I need to elaborate.

Many thanks for reading this
Bigcaesar

[Spriggan]

I have, i generally stems from either firmware issues with WPA security or more commonly old driver issues on the client side of the equation.

but, i will assume all the drivers and firmware are updated. Sometimes odd registry problems will cause permissions errors. inability to ping your default gateway makes me think that this may be more than a software problem. Have you tried static ip's on any of the machines?

(and of course firewalls...)

[bigcaesar]

Hi there,
thanks for the speedy reply. I have to say that my company's policy is that we do not use DHCP. So everything is static. The only security is a 128 bit wep key. As I mentioned before I have a mix of machines connecting and more importantly communicating wirelssly on the LAN, but maybe no coincidence but 2 of the machines I am having problems with are brand new Lenovo Thinkpads. There is an air of inevitability about this. I think I will need to sacrifice a weekend and strip the network down and see if the wifi access point comes up on its own then gradually start adding the nodes. At least its only 30. I could also reset the AP. Thanks again for help so far.

Bigcaesar