Nokia N80 and USB Wi-Fi Dongle

Depends entirely on your smartphone I guess. If you can put its wireless into an ad-hoc mode, then you could probably connect to a usb dongle on a PC, also in ad-hoc mode on the same channel, set up ICS or similar to bridge between the wireless and wired networks, and it might work. My own experience of ad-hoc is that its rubbish by the way.

Thats a lot of ifs. If you can afford a wireless smartphone you can afford another £40 for a wireless router !

Yes, i think it does do ad-hoc.

Money isn't the issue. We have already got the PC set up and working perfectly doing internet connection sharing and media sharing with our Xboxes. Everything is wired using crossover ethernet cables. However, a lot of people I know have had terrible trouble getting the Xbox 360 fully functional (networking wise) via wireless routers. Hence I dont want to have to reconfigure our entire mini-network with a wireless router risking instability in a perfectly stable setup just so as to get the phones wi-fi working - I am just looking for the simplest solution to get the job done.

I have since found a product to do the job. Its called 'wi-fi link' and is a USB device primarily intended for PSP or Nintendo DS online play but which also provides an access point for PDAs/laptops or other wi-fi enabled devices.

However, thanks very much for your help.

Leave the Xboxes etc alone, just add a wireless AP to the network. It's getting sort of hard now (well locally) to find just APs anymore, so if you end up with a Wireless Router, just go into the configuration and disable routing and any DHCP services it wants to provide and just use it in AP mode. Shouldn't cause a problem to your existing network. This would IMO be your best solution longer term.

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.