Windows XP Home won't authicate to 802.11b network

I'm not a Windows person, at all. I have no idea how to get this crap to work.

I have a Linksys router in a box broadcasting a 802.11b network. I have a Windows XP Home machine using the linksys USB 802.11b adapter.

Okay. With 128bit WEP encryption on and router broadcasting the SSID of the network everything's cool. I just set the preferred network to the correct SSID, type in the encryption key and everything works. If I tell the router to not broadcast the SSID Windows XP cannot find the network. Why is this? It's specified as the prefered connection so even if the access point isn't broadcasting the SSID it should still attempt to connect to it first correct?

Try setting the router to accept connections from the mac address of your usb nic. I assume you know how to get to your router's config page. http://192.168.1.1, I believe if for a linksys.

On your pc with the usb wireless
start | run | cmd | ipconfig /all
look for the part that says what your mac is (physical address) It will prolly have numbers and alpha characters seperated with hyphens. Type those characters in the allowable mac address's in your router (without the hyphens)

That would've worked great. Too bad my Linksys can only block mac address instead of put them on an "allow" list. Oh well. I back to running un-secured for now. Thanks for your help.

well, as someone pointed out in a post a week or two ago, not broadcasting your SSID isn't really much(if any) safer than not broadcasting it.

but, I had your same problem with my SSID when not broadcasting it. I set it up to work with it broadcasting, then turned the broadcasting off, lost the network. rebooted and it came back up on the wireless network. no idea why this is, but without it broadcasting my laptop would only pick it up right when i booted the machine up.