Thankyou one and all for your help, you never let me down! It was 2 very simple/stupid mistakes that I knew was probably me!
Firstly I followed DBTL's advice to see the device manager and lo and behold, the ethernet driver/device and USB hubs had yellow question marks, the wizard found these on a setup disk I got for an old computer, not this one!!! As soon as these were installed the home network was detected and activated.
I still had a problem connecting to the net and couldn't understand why until I went into the Belkin settings page and remembered I'd recently changed the ISP password and hadn't updated the Belkin. I'm proud to say I'm now typing this on the desktop connected via the Belkin!
To answer the other queries, I was able to connect the desktop via the Speedtouch330 ADSL which has to be installed initially with the BTYahoo Broadband software as I haven't got a copy of their software installation without modem. When I plugged the Belkin in, the desktop couldn't see it but the laptop connected wirelessly and got an instant connection (although how with the password change I don't know!). The Belkin is the 54g ADSL modem with wireless router and does configure fortunately via DHCP.
I knew it did work as I'd had the connection with it for over a year before I hit 'that' button. My other quiery was why wouldn't the Belkin and Speedtouch work simultaneously, plugged into different filters, but realise now that it was due to the Belkin having the wrong password saved!
Anyhow, thanks once again everyone, I'll try and keep my mouse pointer away from dodgy buttons in the future!
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