I have a bizarre problem with these 2 specific devices. I have never had this problem before between my laptop and the router, until I upgraded the firmware on the router to solve another bug in the router. And now this laptop only (2 others in the house still work fine) is not receiving any broadcast packets from the router. The laptop can send broadcast packets to the rest of the network fine though. But this only happens when I am using WPA encryption. Without encryption, or with just WEP, broadcast packets reach the laptop just fine. This is a real pain because DHCP, ARP, and NetBIOS depend on broadcasts. I have to set my laptop to a static IP. And other computers on the network can't talk to mine unless I ping them first to load their ARP caches, which then clear after a few minutes.
I think it is very strange that this would only happen with one of my wifi cards, and with only the latest router firmware. In case my computer was the problem, I created a new partition and installed a fresh copy of XP Pro SP2 and installed the latest wifi driver. No better.
I don't feel comfortable going back to WEP, and I don't want to go back to the previous router firmware because the bug it had caused the router to crash and reboot very frequently (whenever UDP packets fragmented in a certain way came through (if a fragment before the last of a packet, was the minimum size of 8 bytes. that happens whenever the source's MTU is set 8 bytes higher than a router on the internet)).
I've heard that it's hopeless trying to get D-Link to do anything about problems with their products, especially older models like this one. Can anyone else help me troubleshoot or fix this problem? Or suggest another place I can go for help?
Thanks!