There are three things you can count on: death, taxes and problems with a home network. Faced with a blank browser window, your users don't know whether the cause is a service outage, software conflict, malfunctioning adapter or misconfigured security setting.

Equipment leader Linksys says nearly 70% of calls to its help desk are related to "initial installation and configuration."

If a customer needs to make two or more service calls to install and operate home network equipment, "satisfaction declines precipitously - as much as 25%," according to Parks Associates.

"The more home networking developers and providers can do to reduce service calls, the more satisfied their customers will be," says Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates and author of the new report: "Primary Perspectives: Complexity and Customer Satisfaction in the Networked Home".

"Brand loyalty is directly related to initial satisfaction, so home network players must reduce complexity if they hope to maintain a positive relationship with their customers," he adds.

When the market was new, technical users drove vendors to improve performance, interoperability and security. But now that mainstream users are clogging support hot lines, vendors are responding.

Chip makers, hardware vendors and software start-ups are coming up with ways to automate tasks such as IP addressing, Service Set Identifier (SSID) configuration and encryption key generation; they're developing diagnostic tools that find and often fix network problems without user intervention. Here's a look at what's in the works:

At its Home Networking Day event in San Francisco Wednesday, Linksys plans to unveil a suite of software utilities that ease setup and configuration of Linksys Wireless-G and Speed Booster routers, and Intel Centrino notebooks.

Although Linksys wouldn't provide much detail by press time, it says the Smart Wireless tool, which it created in conjunction with Intel, lets Centrino notebooks automatically connect to a Linksys router. Other tools will provide network analysis and troubleshooting.

The Linksys utilities will officially ship this fall, but the company has been making them available for several months to customers calling the help desk.