ok. i've done everything that has been said "share internet connection" and so on. but my wireless router won't talk to my computer because it is looking for the internet connection. i have a internal dial-up modem, will i need to buy a external modem? the router works pefectly but since i can't access it i can't be the admin :-|. so its managing nothin at the moment. is there anyway around this?

You need to connect via the hardwired lan port at least to configure a wireless router. If you don't plug anything into the WAN port and disable dhcp on the router, then the router will simply act as a wireless bridge between all the wireless and wired connections and you can set up Internet connection sharing as normal. You MUST disable dhcp on the router for this to work.

Now that i've disabled DHCP, it says "limited or no connectivity". what do i do now? On another note, when i go to setup a internet connection share it basically says that "that ip adress is being used by another device" (192.168.0.1) is there a way to tell windows to use another ip?

Sorry, I should have told you that you need to set your pc to a fixed IP address or you won't get back in after disabling dhcp. This is a temporary step, because the pc that does the Internet connection sharing will handle, and requires to handle dhcp for all of it's clients. So, set whatever pc you want to use to setup your router, temporarily with a fixed IP in the range the router uses. You are going to need to change the LAN IP address of the router too if it is conflicting with your windows network when you do this,set it completely out of the range that windows would normally assign like say (192.168.0.254). The lan ip of the router is irrelevant and not used when you're using the router only as a bridge, but it still exists and can't conflict with anything else. Just remember what you set it to so you can get back into the router when you need to.

If your router is using (192.168.0.1) for it's IP then set your config pc's IP to something like (192.168.0.25) with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 that should get you into the router. Then configure your router's LAN address as I said above.

To set your PC's IP address just right click on your PC's "Local Area Connection" then "Properties" then "tcpip" then properties. Select the radio button for "Use the Following Ip Address" then type in your ip address and (255.255.255.0) for the mask. That's all you need to connect to the router. After you're done setting up the router, reset these properties to automatic.

So the basic setup, when your done is, your Internet Sharing pc will hand out IP addresses I believe in the range of 10.0.0.0 IIRC to any PC's requesting dhcp that are connected to the switch. Then it will share its connection with those PCs. The router is completely out of it. Hope this makes sense.

The limited or no connectivity doesn't have anything to do with your IP settings. Something is screwy with the radio transmission.

ok. i've got all that done. but i still am having trouble connecting through the internet using the internet gateway connection on the client computer. It (the internet gateway) will send bytes no problem. however it will not recieve them . i'm probably missing a step that i probably have to do i just don't know what it is...

Thanks again

Can you give me a listing of the exact IP settings you have for each device, both machines, and the router? Perhaps I can see something in it. Be very specific. Also, how are you telling that it can send bytes and not receive? On which interface?

ok basically i set the ip adresses to what you said. However i think i may have lost ya somewhere along the way...

"this,set it completely out of the range that windows would normally assign like say (192.168.0.254). The lan ip of the router is irrelevant and not used when you're using the router only as a bridge, but it still exists and can't conflict with anything else. Just remember what you set it to so you can get back into the router when you need to.

If your router is using (192.168.0.1) for it's IP then set your config pc's IP to something like (192.168.0.25) with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 that should get you into the router. Then configure your router's LAN address as I said above.

To set your PC's IP address just right click on your PC's "Local Area Connection" then "Properties" then "tcpip" then properties. Select the radio button for "Use the Following Ip Address" then type in your ip address and (255.255.255.0) for the mask. That's all you need to connect to the router. After you're done setting up the router, reset these properties to automatic."

so my routers ip is now 192.168.0.254
my host computer is 192.168.0.25 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
i think i lost ya when you said "reset these properties to automatic" the routers or the computers

oh yeah. When i configured ICS an icon automatically appeared on the client computer that was called "internet connection gateway" it showed bytes sent/recieved on the LAN plus the bytes sent/recieved for the internet on the client computer. So the computers were "talking" about the lan, but not the internet.

Sorry it took me a while to get back here to answer you. What operating systems are on which machines? I'll give you a basic setup that works and you'll need to remove ICS from anywhere you've installed it just to make sure it's cleaned out of there. When you've done that, you don't need to change anything else on the router, so don't worry about it. The wireless adaptor on your client PC should be set to get it's IP address settings automatically through DHCP. Your LAN adaptor on your host machine should be set to get it's IP address settings automatically. Make sure the firewall is NOT enabled on either of these adaptors if your using XP or any other firewall software. Now enable Internet connection sharing on your dialup connection on your host PC. When you set it, you'll need to select your LAN adaptor on that machine for the Private LAN. This will automatically set it's IP address and cause ICS to start handing out IP addresses to the other machine. An important thing to remember with ICS is that you cannot make any changes to the network settings after ICS is enabled, it wants total control. It uses 192.168.0.1 by default as the IP address on the host machine's private LAN adaptor. After you make these changes reboot both machines and try it. When you get your client machine up and running after the change, open a command prompt and type ipconfig /all you should get an IP address in the 192.168.0.nnn range if ICS and dhcp is working ok.

Great! thnx i got it to work finally! the only problem now is that my client computers can get files off of the host computer. but the host computer cannot get files off the client computer, and the client computers cannot get files off of eachother.

Thanks again