Home Networking - Hard problem

Hi there,

I have problems setting up my home wireless network. I tried searching
this forum for similar problems but I had no luck. Any help is much,
much appreciated.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
-----------------
My network is very slow.

THE SETTING
-----------
My desktop (Win XP Professional) is connected to the internet through an
ADSL modem. It works fine.
My laptop (Win XP Home) has a wireless network card (Netgear MA521,
802.11b), and so has the desktop (Netgear WG311, 802.11g).
I managed to set up and connect the two network cards in Ad Hoc mode - I
gave up with Infrastructure mode. Note that I had to disable the
Wireless Zero Configuration service on the desktop to make this work.
The connection at the lower layers seems to be fine, as the signal
strength varies from good to excellent.
I also managed to set up the TCP/IP configuration of both machines so
they could ping each other. Good.

THE GOAL
--------

I would like to do something more exciting than just pinging.
Namely: Printer and file system sharing, ICS, Remote Desktop (from
laptop to desktop only of course).

THE PROBLEMS
------------

When I tried to share the printer, which is physically connected to the
desktop, the Microsoft network configuration machinery started up, and I
followed the obvious options for my configuration. No sweat.
I did the same on the laptop (netstart.exe? Can't remember the name),
clearly choosing different options.
This changed the TCP/IP configuration of both ends, adding a bridge on
the laptop and assigning its address automatically.
Now the two boxes have incredibly high pings. Before netstart, the
response was mostly below 10ms, very rarely above 100ms. Now it times
out or is in the thousands of milliseconds. Note though that this might
be a red herring, because I didn't test ping thoroughly beforehand, and
I've also seen bursts of low pings afterwards.
Anyway, doing anything else (e.g. web or remote desktop) is obviously
suicide-slow.

OTHER CLUES
-----------

- With exactly the same hardware and same location I used to be able to
connect and copy across large files. The "only" thing that changed was
that I have installed XP Pro on a clean Hard Disk on the Desktop - it
used to be Win98SE.
- I have occasional problems at the physical level, but I'm pretty sure
that this is as good as it gets and it's not responsible for the TCP/IP
problems I'm getting. I say this because ping responses are the same
whether I have "very low" or "excellent" signal. Anyway, low-level
problems include:
- Signal strength is very volatile, occasionally disconnecting -
especially on the desktop side.
- Sometimes the "site survey" on the desktop displays 2 connections,
1 ad-hoc and 1 infrastructure, and sometimes the MAC address changes.
Anyway, no matter what I connect to, no matter which channel I choose,
no matter the signal, no matter what I do the ping result is the same.
- Once I left the PCs alone for 1/2 hour and when I came back the
automatic address of the laptop had changed to something completely
different (192.168.0.132 -> 164.231.....) and the default gateway unset
(used to be 192.168.0.1).
- After having run ping for some time, it was miracolously working fine.
So I thought I'd take advantage and surf the net from the laptop. The
moment I started doing that the ping went back to high values (1-3
seconds).

MY HUNCH
--------

I think I'm having two distinct problems:
- One at the physical level, but that's always been there and wasn't too
much of a problem in the previous (Win98SE) configuration.
- One at the TCP/IP level, or higher. This is what is seriously slowing
things down. Though I have no networking experience and I don't even
know what tools I may use to get a better diagnosis.

I'm rather depressed. Any ideas?

If you can think of a forum that would be better suited than this please
shout.
Again, thank you very much for your help.

Regards,
Giulio

Seriously consider a wireless router. If your hardware was running 98 and now you have XP I would suspect you have an inheritantly slow system. XP requires more hardware and memory resources than 98 by a long shot. Under those conditions high ping times would be expected.