The other day, I helped a new housemate get his computer connected to my wireless network. I wrote down my unconscionably long, complex password for connecting to the wireless router (something along the lines of "Ud8294mE8P"), double-checked it, and then we started the process of getting Windows XP to connect his computer to the network.

Everything seemed to work right, except Windows couldn't get an IP address from the router. This can be fairly painful due to the wait for the timeout to occur, forcing the computer to give up on trying to lease an address from the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, which is part of the router. This is a frequent problem with my wireless router where the DHCP server, for whatever reason, quits leasing out IP addresses, forcing me to reboot it. I will often reboot it "preemptively," just so I won't have problems while I'm playing an online game, for instance.

But I digress.

So I reboot the router several times, waiting longer and longer periods with the power disconnected from the router (a procedure I've had to follow in the past). But nothing I tried would make it work.

So I went to work on the other end of the problem, my housemate's computer. We deleted the profile for connecting to my wireless network, and created it again, using the exact same settings we used before.

And of course, Windows successfully connected to the network, IP address and all. Which goes to show, you have to be insane to successfully work with Microsoft products.