1390 Connected, but not. My solution.

I recently got an Inspiron 6400 with the 1500 pre-n card. This thing not only wouldn't connect, but would even cause my AP to reboot upon connection attempt. I swapped out the 1500 for a 1390 thinking all of my worries would be over.

I found with this card that I was experiencing a different issue that I've seen a large number of others here experiencing. At first, authentication would work, but it would get stuck on "Acquiring Network Address". I then assigned a static IP. The connection would then show as connected, but could not access the internet or resources on the local network.

The series of steps that finally worked for me was:

1) installed the windows WPA2 patch
2) set my AP from WPA to WPA2 mode
3) set the client to use WPA2

After doing these three things, everything worked as expected. For whatever reason, the 1390 card on this system won't work with WPA on my AP.

Some additional info. I have since set my AP to accept both WPA and WPA2 connections so that I don't have to redo the settings for all of my other wireless clients. Many consumer level APs' only allow you to use one or the other I believe. For those in a business setting, group policy does not currently support WPA2, but will in W2K3 SP2, so any problem systems you want to try this fix on, they will have to be exempted from you current wireless group policy and have the settings done manually.

Hopefully switching to WPA2 will help some others solve this issue (and increase security :)).