Over the past few years, since Vista came out, I have on numerous occasions found that a new laptop – or a re-installed
laptop will not connect to the local wireless system in a customers home.
The SSID is discovered correctly, and it will accept the password, but no matter what I would do it would NOT connect to the internet and get to the point where it asks if this is a home or business internet. (And thus the customer could not access the web, nor get emails)
Initially this just seemed to be an incompatibility between the wireless network card and the router because in all circumstances the laptop would work on another network.
I discovered this fix whilst working on yet another system which absolutely HAD to work with the current router, so after a lot of digging I found this Microsoft KB article explaining how to fix it automatically or manually. The KB article explains exactly why this fix is necessary and why it does NOT occur in Windows 7.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233