[Hampshire] [OT] Odd Wireless LAN problem

Hi all

Here's an interesting one for any of you who know about WLAN.

I have a wireless access point connected to my cabled network. Never had
any trouble with it. The wife's new Vista laptop noticed it and it's
working fine.

I've just bought a (used) wireless enabled laptop and no connection.
Faffed about with all sorts of settings and still no joy. Initial
conclusion: onboard wireless on my "new" laptop is kaput - take back and get
refund. The shop is on the way to work so I took the laptop into work with
me and (for other reasons) powered it up. Surprise surprise - 3 wireless
LANs detected at work. It wouldn't let me connect to any (need a key) but
next conclusion: no problem with onboard WLAN.

So it means my PC will play ball at work, but not at home. My wife's PC is
fine at home. Thinking it may be a signal strength issue (all WLANs at
work were detected weak) I've just set the laptop right next to the access
point and still no joy.

All this is under XP pro, but I have also booted the machine off an Ubuntu
disk with no WLAN access. It was that initially that made me think its
onboard LAN was broken. Havaid said that I've never used Ubuntu (or any
Linux distro) with WLAN so if there's a step I'm missing, please shout - I
expected it to work out of the box as most other Ubuntu things have (and
that's no disrespect to any other distro).

FWIW it's a Toshiba tecra T9000 and I know about the WLAN switch and WLAN
hotkey combination. If anyone could shed any light on this, that would be
good.

Cheers
Rob