Intermittent wireless connection on R51 w/WPA & XP Pro S

[RBob]

I have a new R51 (1836-H7U) running XP Pro SP2 and an internal Intel 2200BG WiFi adapter configured to use WPA, talking to an Actiontec GT701 DSL router.

I'm not using XP's Wireless Zero config (service is turned off), nor am I using the Windows firewall. I have the latest Intel drivers and IBM utilities installed, and the current Qwest firmware installed in the router.

On boot, the wireless connection works just fine, but after a few minutes the connection will drop. Then a few seconds later the connection will come back. It will drop and return spontaneously for "a while" and then settle down and run fine for hours.

When this is happening, I'm only a few feet from the router and have a solid green indication on the Intel status icon.

At first I thought it was my Sygate Security Agent firewall, but the symptoms are the same if that service is shut down.

I don't see this problem when I'm using wireless at work using WEP.

Other than playing with the firewall, I haven't done much to track down the problem. Before I start tearing things apart, does this sound familiar to anybody? Anything in particular I might try first?

[RBob]

Following up to my own message ...

Monitoring the circuit with Ethereal, I see the router and the 2200BG exchanging EAPOL packets every 60 seconds, which I guess is the WPA key rotation scheme.

When the connection drops, I see the router sending its packet to me, but the 2200BG doesn't respond.

Also, when I thought that the connection would recover on its own, I was wrong; it's merely the "Access Connections" program apparently thinking it's OK and popping up its little bubble; I still can't use the circuit unless I manually disconnect and reconnect.

I reinstalled the drivers but no difference.

Any suggestions?

[Porsche]

I am having a similar problem. After installing SP2 on my T42p, my wireless connection (using the latest abg driver and access connection) would intermittently lose connection for no apparent reason. Sometimes, it never comes back until I release IP and renew IP. Any opinions on a solution?

[Porsche]

After trying many permutations of installing and reinstalling the wireless lan driver and access connection for hours and hours, I finally found a solution that worked for me: I revert my bios to 3.06f (the latest is 3.08), and then reinstalled the latest wireless and access connection software. Much to my surprise, this worked. My wireless connection has not been dropped since, not even once. I hope this info will be useful to some of you with a similar wireless problem. I understand your frustration.

[puco]

I had the same problem (or at least it looks like it). Mine ewnt down every hour = 3600 seconds which was exactly the ReKeying interval on my wireless router (SMC Barricade 2804). I only disabled the rekeying and everything looks ok. This is only a workaround and no solutions. But it looks like the driver for 2200BG has some problems with WPA, so I think we have to wait for a new driver.

[Fignuts]

After trying many permutations of installing and reinstalling the wireless lan driver and access connection for hours and hours, I finally found a solution that worked for me: I revert my bios to 3.06f (the latest is 3.08), and then reinstalled the latest wireless and access connection software. Much to my surprise, this worked. My wireless connection has not been dropped since, not even once. I hope this info will be useful to some of you with a similar wireless problem. I understand your frustration.

I was also having problems getting my R51 (with 2200bg wifi, on Windows XP SP3, using Intel PROSet version 12.4.4.0, wifi driver version 9.0.4.39) to maintain a connection to my secured wifi network (even with different routers/networks). I tried everything else I could find first, including setting the power management slider to "Highest" (max performance), roaming aggressiveness slider to "Lowest" (no roaming), different driver versions, and allowing Windows to manage the connection. Reverting to firmware 3.06f (available on this page: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... migr-50273) seemed to do the trick. It no longer seems to have problems connecting or maintaining the connection to my WPA2-secured network (I've successfully tested other security modes as well). I didn't need to reinstall the wifi drivers or software (I'm letting Intel's PROSet/Wireless Utility manage my connections). I'd previously been using the most currently up-to-date firmware for the R51, version 3.23, released on July 3, 2007.

Thanks so much for posting this fix, Porsche! It helped out a lot, even six years later...