Wireless antennas not working on either computer

[mom27kids]

I hope someone can give me an idea of what might be wrong. I'll explain it the best I can.

I had a 2Wire router and cable modem on my computer (running XP pro) and the wireless antenna on my son's computer as hooked up by a Road Runner tech and it worked fine.

Son's computer is being returned to school and I have another computer, also running XP pro to replace it. I decided to hook the router and cable modem up to kids computer in living room and hook the wireless antenna to mine in the bedroom.

Kids computer worked fine and wireless antenna would not work on mine. I had the RR tech come out and he hooked up a new antenna which also would not work. The computer recognizes the hardware, asks for the driver, which we install but it says the wireless network is unavailable. The tech says I should reformat to repair an obviously damaged file, which I do. It still doesn't work.

Then I took the router and cable modem and hooked them back up to my computer, worked fine. I hooked up the wireless antenna to the kids computer and installed the driver, got the same message. It's there but it says wireless network not available. How can this be on both computers? I've tried several USB ports on my computer, and three antennas and get the same results every time.

Can I just NOT have wireless on these computers? I'm extremely frustrated. The RR tech has no idea why this is happening. Can anyone help?

Teresa
(who has 7 kids, not 27)

[mbossman2]

Before you take Mr RR's advice make sure that all your settings on the "new" machine are correct:

Make sure the SSID is correct
Make sure that MAC Filtering on the wireless router is off (so you can add the new MAC address to allow access then turn it back on)