This is really starting to tick me off....

Last Sunday evening my wireless router finally gave up the ghost. It was starting to act kinda squirrelly and needing to be reset pretty often, it finally refused to reset and just kept recycling through it's POST. I had been needing a new one for a while anyway, this router was an old "B" type that did not support WEP. so I went down to Wally World (the only place open at 7:30 pm on a Sunday evening that sold this sort of stuff.) and bought myself a Belkin 802.11g wireless router. I got home and set it up and was able to get my daughter's machine which uses a Dlink 802.11G PCI card to connect using 128 bit WEP without even breaking a sweat. but my other daughter's machine, a rebuilt old P2 Dell running Win 98se (there is a reason it runs win 98se, several of her educational programs, which are hand me downs from my older daughter won't run under 2k or xp, even in so-called "Compatability mode"), using an Airlink 101 MIMO G PCI card refuses to connect. (it connected fine to the old Network Anywhere 802.11b router so I know the card works) I thought perhaps that the channel the card chose was noisy at that range and tried a different channel. no dice. It won't even connect with WEP turned off. Now, I had to re-install the utility software that came with the card to be able to turn WEP encryption on. and I am wondering if it has screwed up the winsock stack or something. Here is the part that really gets me though. I can ping the other machines IP addresses fine. so I know that much of the network hardware/software works. I'm at the end of my rope. If anybody can suggest anything to try I'm all ears. I am contemplating re-installing the OS to try to repair any files/drivers that might have been corrupted, I'm also contemplating yanking the card and going down and buying a dlink card instead of a no-name generic chi-com card. I know some MIMO devices don't play well with some 802.11G devices, Linksys had some problems with that if I recall. so the MIMO bit may be my problem, but if that were the case why would I be able to ping the other machines? I really need the MIMO range though because the machine is a good 40 feet from the router and the other side of two oblique walls.