I was wondering why I have a wireless network that I can connect to and it says I have a great connection, but when I'm connected it doesn't allow me to browse the Internet or anything. Are there any settings or anything I could change to get the thing working. Thanks.
-- Nathan Fuenffinger

We need to go through a process of elimination to find the cause or causes for your problem. The first thing I would try is ping. Make sure that you can ping the default router for your network and other devices on the network. You should be able to do this since you would appear to be getting an IP address but we need to make sure that you can talk to other devices on the network.

If you can ping the other devices on the network, that says that basic connectivity is in place. If you can't ping, it may be necessary to temporarily disable the firewalls on the other computers to get a ping through. If things start working but you still can't browse the local network, you may need to look at the firewall settings of the computer that you are having the problem with. You may need to allow the IP range to pass through without any blocking or filtering of traffic.

If you are still having problems, see if there are any driver updates for the network card in the problem computer. Also, try using a USB type network card to see if the problem stays with the computer or with the network card. If the problem goes away with the USB network card, this would appear to indicate a problem with the driver or the IP stack for the card.

Try assigning a static IP address, subnet mask and gateway for the problem network card for the built in network card. If this works, this could point to a DHCP related problem, possibly with the DHCP server handing out bad or corrupted information or with the way that the network card is getting the information. This would be a good time to break out your network sniffer to see how the traffic is being sent on the network and being presented to the computer in question. This might also help give you some ideas as to why it can't browse the local network.