Wireless Grief

trying to use a speedtouch usb 121g stick attached to a laptop to connect to a speedtouch 570 adsl wireless router. it connects all very well but fails to grab the IP address. it stays on 0.0.0.0 for a while and then reverts to the usual 169.x.x.x address. tried nearly everything!!!
everything seems and looks fine. i used the internal wifi card on the laptop to connect and it connected instantly with 100% signal strength!!!
any leads??

the adsl router works fine with the ethernet direct cable connection with the laptop. but whenever i try to use the 121g usb dongle, i come back to the same problem

Well it sounds as if DHCP is working, it's just your speedtouch card that has a problem in recieving the address.
Try having a search on the net to see if there are better drivers for the card. And another sort-of known issue if you're using XP might be to try disabling the Wireless Zero Configuration service. This service is what Windows uses to manage the connection to wireless services but some driver/installation sets for some cards attempt to do this themselves and they conflict. I've had this with some DLink cards.

dear bishop,
the 121g was recently bought from thomsom themselves, the drivers are the latest. i have checked. i had disabled the inbuilt wireless card on my laptop, and also disabled WCZ from services before trying to install the usb receiver

Is it in infrastructure mode rather than ad-hoc mode? It needs infrastructure mode to connect to an access point.

yes its in infrastructure mode. like i said, i tried to use a static ip address (the one the internal wifi card would use) but it would connect, but i cannot ping the gateway (the adsl router). tried using updated drivers, no joy. i think that 121g usb stick is not backward compatible with 802.11b, even though it says it is on the label. any suggestions?