The reason for this is simple. To avoid revealing to others the code is 26 or other characters long, this field is set to do this for security reasons. It's sad an explainer is not given with this feature.
I'm running Vista on a Medion laptop. After connecting to the wireless network as an official guest at a local university, my home network connection (WORKGROUP) is fried. This has happened before, but System Restore always did the trick. This time I restored as far back as I could go, but WORKGROUP has not been restored. (I set a Restore point when everything was working fine just before I connected at the school, but that point was corrupted and did not work when I got home.)
* I can connect to the Internet with no problem
* The wireless connection shows that I have both Internet and local connectivity, but I can only connect to this computer.
* WORKGROUP does show in Explorer, but this is the only listed machine.
* There are four other computers active in WORKGROUP.
* Nothing changes when I plug into the ethernet connection.
I went into the Security tab in Properties window for the wireless connection and discovered that the 26 character WEP security code is being reduced to 8 dots, even after I reenter it. But that would not explain why the ethernet cable won't work. It is not dependent on a security code.
Any new ideas?
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