I had the good fortune of upgrading my wireless setup to the D-Link DI-624 wireless router and their DWL-G650 PC card a little while back. Everything’s been running quite well. The connection at home’s been running at the rated 108Mbps (yeah, I know, that’s not a real data rate) and I’ve connected to some public 802.11b access points (one at MoonBeans Coffee and a couple of McDonald’s installations) as well as some friends’ houses so this weekend I decided to apply the WPA update from Microsoft to see how it works.
What a disaster! I searched Google and couldn’t turn up any magic bullets and wrestled with it for over 24 hours, including just uninstalling the update and nothing would restore the stability I’d had earlier. The only oddity I’d seen before the WPA update was an inability to connect to anything outside my PC after a resume from hibernation if I left ehe card in when I powered back up. Not a big deal, really — I’d just pop the card out and reinsert it and everything would be fine. After the update I’d periodically lose connectivity and be unable to restore it (I’d get associated with the AP but wouldn’t get an IP address). Only recourse was to reboot. And this continued after I’d uninstalled the update.
Fortunately, I’d created a System Restore point before installing the update (just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you). I restored and now everything’s back to normal. Hope it stays that way.
Now, wouldn’t you think the WPA update would’ve created a System Restore point itself? Moral of the story: never assume Windows will do something that you can do for yourself.
I *am* running XP and it wasn’t automatic — at least there was only *one* restore point set, the one I’d set. And, yes, I uninstalled the patch from the Add/Remove Programs applet and still experienced the problems. That was the reason I finally restored from the restore point I’d created.
If you were running XP, the restore points should have been automatic. If not, you can force a checkpoint before doing anything serious. Did you check the Remove/uninstall programs list to see if you could handle it that way?