OH GOD, I pray someone can help me. This is driving me INSANE. Ok, we have three computers in our house, the main one upstairs, has the modem and wireless router, and connects via a wire into the router next to the pc. And the other two computers are downstairs and use wireless USB adapters to connect to the router. Sounds dandy then, shouldnt be any problems, right? wrong. For some reason both of the downstairs computers want to connect to this other router which is in our neigborhs house. It constantly interupts the downstairs computers connection to our router 'linksys' and trys to go into our neighborhs '2wire494' and gets denied because they use a network key or something, well, then it just gets messed up from there, you then have to manually go back in to the view availble wireless connections screen and reselect linksys. ... then it works great... for 10 more minutes then disconnects and trys to get on the other peoples router. Anyone understand what im trying to explain? :-(! I just have no idea how to fix it, I cant seem to find a way to make the computers downstairs only connect to the linksys connection (the router upstairs), they keep straying onto the other one which dosent work. As far as security goes and such, theirs nothing enabled. no firewall. nothing. I just plugged the crap in and hoped it worked. and this is the problem. I ATTEMPTED to enable wep and put a network key on and all that junk, but then none of the wireless computers would get a connection and just screw up. The only way it works is in open mode, all the pcs get a connection then. GOD I HATE THIS. Why is all this so complicated >:-O!!! Can anybody gimme some advice?? paallleaasse? :'-(!

first get an antenna for the wireless machines. then go into the router configuration and set the network ID to something different than what comes as a default. the default is like 192.168.0.1 for the router. change it to something like 192.168.100.1. then set all of the computers in your house to static IP addresses. so the first one will have 192.168.100.5 and the second computer will have 192.168.100.6 and the third computer will have 192.168.100.7.
now:
on each computer set the default gateway and DNS server search order to the IP of the router {192.168.100.1} violla no more problems. the issue your having is that the 2 different networks are running the same IP addressing scheme { known as the Network ID} and both are running DHCP {dynamic ip addressing for the clients}. that shoulkd fix it. oh ya...turn off DHCP on your router or eveyone and their grandma will be using your internet connection, because it sounds to me like your not using WEP encryption.
good luck
aJ

I ran into a similar problem with a access point. I put a access point in another building via vlan. Problem was that half the time the pc would make a connection to the main wireless router with its poor connection state.

There is no solution to stopping the pc from grabbing what it believes is a good physical connection that I could find.

Solution for me was to vlan all the way to the pc and remove the wireless access point.

How your ip is configured makes no difference at this level. You might try a different channel on the router for the wireless but even a stronger signal isn't going to stop the wireless pc card from scanning.

I agree try a different channel , you are probably using the same channel . Also you need to figure out how to set the SSID on the router and also the wireless clients . also should use mac address filtering , if you don't do any of this anybody in your neighborhood could use your wireless connection .

go with a static IP where you define everything and choose your network. this is allso why having a different network ID is a key to strong network security, because your not following "defaults". i see 5 networks in my apartment complex off my home box alone. each one set to default network ID and 2 with default password and only one with wep encryption and none with MAC address filtering, oh and one with a PC staqnding outside the firewall {via DMZ or something}
my points are valid.
look into em
AJ

I think you guys are missing the point.

Sure set the channel/security/mac filtering. This should be standard security for wireless.

But the problem is the workstation wireless card doing scans which is way down the ladder compared to ip/config.

It was my observation that there was absolutely no control over this feature. THIS is where the problem exists. If there is a tiny break it appears that these wireless cards automatically rescan all channels. The access point I referred to before was set to 2 and the wireless router set to 11. Laptop would still grab 11 and not 2 even though 2 was 20 feet and 11 was a building across a court yard.

Only way I can think that you might control the reception direction is use some EMF shielding material between the wireless PC and the direction of the neighbors wireless. Shielding the router wouldn't accomplish anything since its what the workstation is picking up that matters.

If you know your neighbor well enough go and ask them to disable broadcasting of the SSID on there router. This way you will never see there connection and your computer want try to connect to it. You need to do the same also. You need to change your default SSID from Linksys to something else. Also change the default password because everyone know what it is. Then you can go and do all the MAC and WEP or WPA security options. By the way do WPA and not WEP.