Ok, see what you think.....

Called my network friend over......he's about 65 years old.

Came over to solve my router problem that had us perplexed. Our wireless router was up and working, then my husband unplugged the modem and poof! My network was gone, never to return, despite the suggestions from many gurus here.

He decided that our router was bad.....sent husband off to buy another wireless G router at Wal-Mart.

Not the router.

Then he decides that something on my machine has "captured and hidden" my network connections because he can't see any and can't add any.

I'm not really sure what is going on but in the end the man is blaming software on my machine, and AOL. Everyone blames AOL for everything, sorry, I gotta use it for my business email and I have family members using screen names that are too poor to pay for it. It was working with AOL before!

Anyway, if any of you can gleen anything from this, bottom line is, my wireless router was working, my laptop worked fine with it, now ever since the modem was unplugged it doesn't. This man was releasing IP's on the router and the modem....nothing. He was changing things until I got scared that I would no longer recognize anything.

Is there something I'm missing here????????? I'm just about insane because I cannot get anyone over here with any sense to figure this out. I build, sell and repair pc's on a regular basis, but will have NOTHING to do with networking, just don't want to know it, don't want to learn it. Can anyone suggest an online manual, some kind of troubleshooting tips or maybe some known issues with XP on setting this up?

He made me uninstall my firewall, trying to get me to uninstall AOL and now I think I want to set it on fire.

Thanks in advance,
Sharon