Need some help fixing my dad's PC. All of a sudden, or most likely when I changed our network password, his wireless connection stopped working. I tried typing in the password like 20 times. I tried virus scans. I tried reloading the drivers and even swapped the usb card out with a newer one and it still doesn't work! The network appears when you scan, but when I try to connect to it it just times out and says it cannot connect. Any ideas or suggestions?

Disable norton firewall?

Don't have it. I turned off everything including Windows' firewall. Still no success.

This might be a little too over the top but...

If it's a mix between an intel wireless card, and linksys, or some other brand. They used to have their own way of decrypting a WEP key. Intel was the standard way which used Key 0 of hex, and others thought it was more secure to use Key 1 or Key2. Bottom line is if your putting your network passkey in - intel might decrpyt it into hex one way while the router is using a different way. Just use the hex key on both so it will not get confused in the dcryption. Or use WPA2-Personal-Tkip. Or if you changed from WEP to WPA - the wireless card might not support WPA encryption. Check those and let me know.

I thought the type of encryption may be the problem as well but I switched out the wireless card to a Netgear one that I had bought the same time as the Netgear router. Or am I misunderstanding the problem and you're saying it may be an issue with the hardware of the computer itself? Pretty sure both encryption types are set to WPA + WPA2 or whatever.

Well some wireless cards (USB or otherwise) cannot handle certain types of WPA encryption. So if your router is using WPA, you might try changing it to WEP to see if the card recognizes it fine. This is a real common problem with wireless printers also because the wireless adapter for the printer can't handle WPA at all but they can handle WEP fine. I used to get this issue probably twice a week when I worked at Geek Squad.

But if you've changed the encryption back to WEP on the router and you still cant' get the card to work then yeah, something else is wrong. I've never seen a wireless card NOT work on WEP unless it was defective.

You could try connecting after setting your router to DMZ mode. That would rule out any misconfigured settings.