I brought home a new laptop last night - Toshiba Satellite M45, with an internal Atheros AR5005G wireless network adapter. I had significant trouble getting the new laptop to connect to my home's wireless B network. My work laptop (Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG internal adapter) and my home desktop (DLink USB Wireless G adapter) as well as miscellaneous B adapters (TiVo, print server) are connected to the network with little or no problems.

Interstingly, the new machine saw and briefly connected (verified by surfing) to my neighbor's open Linksys network, but only saw mine for brief instances and never connected. I have never seen my neighbor's network on any other machine.

I had a Linksys WPC11 card from an old machine that I installed in the new machine - immediate connectivity. This implies to me that there's nothing inherently wrong with the WinXP settings.

Finally I changed the router setting from channel 11 to Channel 1 and suddenly the new machine connected. Working on Ch 1 now.

Why would I be seeing this problem on one computer only? I did download a driver update from Toshiba last night in the middle of troubleshooting but it didn't seem to make any difference. If this sounds like it could be a hardware problem I'd like to make that determination during the 14-day return period. I won't be able to troubleshoot for a week beginning this weekend. I've verified that I still have DNS slots available in the router.

Suggestions? Options?