I have just spent a few weeks scratching my head about a problem with wireless networking and have found a solution in one of the more 'shady' regions of the internet. Just thought I would post it in case anyone else has it and wants to save time.

I run a Belkin 11gb wireless network in my house with a few (5) PC's attached (so to speak). I found that one of them, a laptop running XP home with the Belkin PCMCIA F5D6020 in AdHoc mode started up correctly, accessed the server, but without fail dropped the connection after about 5 minutes. Changing channels and then returning to the original channel semed to correct the problem for another 5 minutes, but it then lost the plot again.
After much digging around, I discovered that when the card is installed, a service called "Wireless Zero Configuration" is installed and is set to start automatically. Setting this to manual start (and NOT starting it), seems to cure the problem. The suggestion was made in the 'shady' place that the service is to let Windows control the wireless connection, however taking it out of the equation to let the Belkin software control the network has no detrimental effect and in fact has fixed my problem.

I too found out that once I figured out what I was doing it was better to let my adapter software run the wireless connection than to let Windows do it.

To be fair, the Windows way worked, and I did use it to get going initially, but there were favourable options in my adapter software that Windows could not access.

Cheers

AA

Too true, for any wireless you are running, change the network ID to something other than the default, and allow only the MAC addresses of your wireless devices and/or use the encryption.