Home networking again!

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I am a bit of a newbie at this, but would appreciate any advice/help on a problem with my home network. This is the situation and what I have done.
I have a PC upstairs running Windows ME.
I have just bought a new PC and put it downstairs. This is running Windows XP.
The new PC is all bells and whistles and is set up for wireless networking.
A friend of mine had a BT Voyager card which I installed in the PC upstairs.
I then went through various network set up wizards in an attempt to get the 2 PCs to talk to each other. Eventually I checked a box which referred to ad-hoc networking and hey presto it all suddenly burst into life and both machines could see each other (well the shared folders I had defined anyway). Marvellous, and all was hunky-dory at this stage.

I had set it up to grant read only/update access based on 2 different passwords.

After a couple of days of no problems reading each machine from the other, I decided I wanted to update a file on the PC upstairs so when I went to connect I gave it the update password but it rejected it saying password incorrect. Strange I thought as I was sure it was correct. Never mind the next day I switched on upstairs first to re-specify the passwords. Then switched on downstairs and tried to access it, but after expanding My Network Places in Windows Explorer, clicking on the upstairs folder resulted in an error message along the lines of "could not connect, maybe down to user access", or something like that - even though I hadn't put the password in at this stage. Then in front of my eyes the upstairs drive vanished within Explorer, and over a week later I have not yet managed to get it to return again!!! When I click on My Network Places now, on each PC, I can see the shared files on that machine only, although sometimes I will also get an error message when expanding My Network Places, along the lines of "cannot connect to network". But then a couple of minutes later it is ok.
The signal strength upstairs is "Excellent", whilst downstairs it is "Low". I wondered if this was the reason for the loss of connection, although they have both always shown Excellent and Low.

Sorry for rambling on a bit but does anyone have any ideas why the PCs cannot now see each other - does it sound like a reception problem? The connection still shows as active on both, ie successfully logged on to the network so if there was a reception problem would that not work also?

Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
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