I have a Linksys wireless router that has 3 xboxes and a Slackware computer (192.168.1.100) wired to it. I bought a new computer and it is wirelessly connected (192.168.1.137) to the router through a linksys wireless usb adaptor. The new computer currently runs XP Home. Since setting up the XP comp with a usb wireless adaptor the wired LAN has become broken. I can ping the the Slackware machine from the wireless XP one, but I can't ping wireless XP from Slackware. The xbox connected at 192.168.1.101 is online and can be pinged by XP and slackware, but the xbox at 192.168.1.103 cannot be pinged by Slackware or XP and it can't access the web/samba shares. The xbox 360 connected at 192.168.1.102 is also off line. The slackware and XP machines can both access the web.

Thanks in advance for any solutions you can provide. My end goal is to change the xp machine into a linux box with samba and dvd burning capability, but I just wanted to make sure everything works in windows before trying in Linux. It's important that I mention that the wireless router with 4 machines wired to it has always had wireless enabled with mac and wep security for handheld devices, so the router is not behaving strangely because I'm suddenly using its wireless function. The whole lan has been healthy for months until tonight when I finally got the wireless usb adaptor connected to the wireless router.

wait... two machines on the LAN, connected to the 4-port ethernet switch on the router, are currently unable to ping one another?? =/

Everything can ping one another now, I guess I'm just having DHCP problems that I don't know how to fix. It's like everytime I mess with the wireless usb on the windows pc it re-arranges the LAN ip for all of the machines. The Slackware box is now *101 for instance.

is it a WRT54G?? the firmware for it was updated last month IIRC... also maybe see if a reset to factory defaults helps?? either way, perhaps you could give the ethernet boxes static leases or just plain-old static IPs (not a solution, but a work-around)?? i'm just kinda thinking-out-loud here, it's a weird problem and i'm not sure what to make of it...

win32sux, Thanks for the advice and sorry for the long reply time. You're right about the router type, and thanks for advising me of the update. The DHCP LAN ip address rearrangement isn't happening anymore after power cycling and rebooting. I believe twice was the magic number, as the problem temporarily changed to include some hosts not being able to get online. Everything's fine now, but the XP machine can't access the SMB shares on the slackware one. It prompts for a user name and password even though there's no need for one. It's a public share that the xboxes' xbmc uses to access media via smb://192.168.1.101/public, but XP needs a password.