Well, I ended up getting a Trendnet G card for about $22 after rebates from Buy.com. There were a lot of bad reviews on the cheap cards being sold at ecost, so I thought it best to avoid those. The Trendnet card seemed to have a relatively high ratio of favorable reviews and I noted that they had very recent driver updates posted on their support site, indicating good ongoing support.

Installed the card after downloading the latest driver and everything went smoothly. Card seems to work well. It sees my neighbor's encrypted B network, through two exterior walls and probably at least 150 feet away.

It picked up t-mobile's pay to use wi-fi at SFO, but I didn't feel like paying for it at the time. Will be trying to use it at SFO's RCC (do they have free access there?) and NRT's RCC tomorrow.

One thing I did have a little trouble with was in initially getting my browser to actually use the wi-fi connection. It kept wanting to use the default dial-up connection, even though the wi-fi connection was present. Anyway, I did eventually get it to work but I'm not sure of exactly what it was that did the trick.

Anyway, it is nice to be wi-fi enabled now and I'm looking forward to using it. Thanks again to all who responded to this thread.