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.

"You download this app from our Web site and it'll check your network settings on Windows and make sure you're doing everything right," says Linksys product manager Mani Dhillon. "If you have the wrong firmware, it will download and install the right version and make sure your connection's up and running. On the help desk, it's been fixing 90% of users' problems."

Linksys is expected to forge a similar partnership with Broadcom to offer Broadcom's configuration utility SecureEZSetup, which it announced last May, with Linksys products using Broadcom chips.

"We want to make sure that no matter what PC or laptop you have, we can support it," Dhillon says.

Like Intel's Smart Wireless utility, SecureEZSetup asks end users two questions: birth date; and one of a choice of mother's maiden name, street you grew up on or pet's name. The answers are put into a hashing algorithm that generates the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) keys.

Some in the industry, including wireless chip maker Atheros, have expressed concern that simplifying encryption key generation using this question/answer scheme "dumbs down" security, and makes the network vulnerable to dictionary attacks.

"There is a way to simplify security without compromising," says Colin Macnab, vice president of marketing and business development for Atheros. "You can use an 'out of band' medium, meaning you configure something manually at each device, without broadcasting signals over the air. You can show users on-screen things they can do to simplify product setup that doesn't allow them to be hacked because only they have access to the physical devices."

Macnab says the home network industry's next challenge is to simplify the network and security configuration of "headless devices," such as media and music players that don't have LCDs and keyboards, but perhaps only a switch and an LED. "You have to be able to install them securely and easily," he says.

While Macnab won't offer details, he says "Atheros is developing products in this space," and that he wouldn't be surprised if they were available before Christmas. "Don't underestimate what we've already done," he says. Today, Sony sells TVs in Japan that include Atheros 802.11a chipsets.

Along those same lines, Saral Networks, an early-stage start-up, has developed software that automatically configures network and security settings across all products behind the scenes. End users load the software onto a PC, follow some screen prompts, then plug in a unique 16-digit ID home network number into each device on the network. The number runs through various algorithms to generate the necessary SSID, WPA keys for wireless devices, an encryption key for a HomePlug device.

Saral CEO Samrat Vasisht says he thinks Broadcom and Intel's question/answer security configuration scheme "is a paradigm that needs to go away. It not only dumbs down security to a great extent, but it's also limited to devices that have alpha keys. How do you plug a username/password into a microwave oven?"

The length of the 16-digit number makes it secure, and Vasisht envisions users carrying their IDs in a wallet or memorizing their numbers, as some do with credit card numbers. Because users plug the 16-digit number manually into each device, no information is transmitted over the air between secure and unsecure devices, as Atheros' Macnab recommends.

"There's a mindset that the user needs control over the key," Vasisht says. "We think that's not necessary, as long as the network is configured right. Other technologies, like Buffalo Technology's AirStation One-Touch Secure System and Zigbee, require you to hit a key on one device that then shoots the key out to the other device within a predefined time period, 1 or 3 seconds or so. They rely on sending the key over a low-power signal so a snooper can't pick it up. With Zigbee, it might mean somebody messes up my lighting, but with a home network, that's risky. Somebody could break into your financial records," Vasisht says.