I hope you all have something good to offer me here, before I do all kinds of crazy things today. I have my laptop running good with a fresh winxp home install except for the wireless and my network. I have all MS updates including sp3 and the latest driver for my wireless. There is this mac bridge that came out of nowhere, which makes it work but everything else that tries to access my network has an IP address conflict. Right now I have everything unbridged and the bridge itself disabled.
The network places feature on the laptop is better now than it has been for a very long time, but now my main pc won’t show the laptop, just the old stuff, which I have since deleted. Would resetting the router or uninstalling it and starting over fix this, and maybe the wireless problem also. My router is ...Linksys Router..WRT54G V8. Unless I find some real direction, my next step is to take the laptop to another location and see if I can connect to another network. Reset my router and start over. As a last resort, buy a usb wireless adapter.
Any ideas please?

Hi

youve messed up a setting in the router, use the restore defaults option in the router setup page and set everything back to defaults, you will need to reset your WIFI options such as SSID and any security keys.

Yes....and all indications were that it was the laptop itself, which held me back for a day. Once I realized different and sent for the router, just unplugging it and the cable modem for a spell fixed the problem, but in the meantime of trying it on another network and then downloading some more drivers from HP and MS, I could have had two problems at the same time.
Anyway, thanks for your input.