USB wireless not working in Win2000

[PopeKevinI]

USB 802.11b, don't know the maker off hand. It's a generic.

It works on my Windows XP Pro system, and on my wife's system when I boot it off its old hard drive running WinME. On my wife's system in 2000, it finds the WAP, says it has excellent signal strength, and the NIC's software reports that it is connecting to the network. But...it will never get a DHCP address. It autoassigns a 169 address.

The network stack for 2000 works, because the NetGear 10/100 card I have in it works just fine.

If I set the wireless NIC to a static IP inside my network's address range, it doesn't work.

I'm out of ideas

 

[DistributedBen]

Is there any encryption on the network? The only thing I can think of is maybe the security key was typed in wrong. I say this because I spent seveal hours trying to fix a similar problem only to find out I typed the last four charecters of the key in wrong. Once I did that, it pulled down an IP and everything worked.

 

[PopeKevinI]

I tried deliberately typing the wrong key, and got an error. I've typed it in a half dozen times correctly, always the same problem.

 

[moetop]

You said this card is "Generic" where did you get the drivers from? Disk, Internet download, Built in Windows ? Even if it is generic it should have a model # on it. google the model number plus driver and see f there are any newer drivers.

 

[PopeKevinI]

You said this card is "Generic" where did you get the drivers from? Disk, Internet download, Built in Windows ? Even if it is generic it should have a model # on it. google the model number plus driver and see f there are any newer drivers.

It's a white usb nic with no markings on it. The disk is equally nondescript: just "USB400" on it.