travelwitheric,

Enable SSID broadcast until you get I1000 to connect.  Windows XP has a habit of refusing to connect to networks not broadcasting the SSID even if it is in the preferred list.  After a few connections you can disable SSID broadcast and the I1000 should connect just fine.

Stick with Windows to manage the wireless card since you are running SP2 and configure the TCP/IP properties to use DHCP.  It would not hurt to disable WEP until you get connectivity.

travelwitheric,

Looks like we're down to the short straws. 

Do you have any other PCMCIA cards (other than wireless NICs) that you can plug into the PC just to test if the PCMCIA interface is properly working on the I1000?  Do you possibly have a USB wireless network adapter that you could use as a test device?

In your first post, what did you mean by " no 192.168.x.x, or NAT being used) ?"  The router by default uses NAT and assigns addresses starting at 192.168.1.100.

At this point it's hard to tell if the problem is the hardware or WinXP.  You could obviously reinstall Windows to see if that resolves the problem, or install it on a second partition without destroying the first.  I am not aware of outstanding SP2 issues that manifest this way.  There have been lots of posts regarding good connectivity but no network access and they are usually resolved by updated drivers or updated router firmware or were user configuration errors.

Are you absolutely certain MAC filtering is off, or you haven't exceeded the router's DHCP address range?

Paladin, thanks for your help.

I had also thought that there might be an issue with the PCMCIA slot and tried it with a couple of different cards. It worked fine with a Netgear FA410 Ethernet card and a 3Com 56K modem card.

What I meant by not using 192.168.x.x or NAT is that I have an assigned subnet of real IP addresses and that I'm not using network address translation because I'm not using the any of the dummy IP addresses within the 192.168.x.x range. Of the 16 addresses I have assigned, one is the network address, one is the broadcast, one is assigned to the router, 5 are available for static and 8 are available for DHCP. If I check the router after making a connection but not having Internet access, I notice that the computer doesn't show up in the DHCP tables. I thought this might be a router issue, but it only appears to happen with this particular computer. All the other computers connect fine and are assigned an address. Nonetheless, I upgraded the firmware in the router a couple of days ago just to be sure, but it didn't make a difference.

MAC filtering is turned off and there are no time restrictions in place. I have three servers using static IP addresses and only four devices that use DHCP. I've checked to make sure DHCP leases were expiring correctly and releasing the addresses and found no problems there.

I'm down to reinstalling the OS, but I'm trying to avoid having to do that unless absolutely necessary. I'm going to try a system restore to the point of the original out-of-the-box configuration to see if that makes any difference. Thanks for your suggestions.