Ad hoc wireless networking is driving me insane

[Guest]

so i live in an apartment complex that is connected to the internet, and just
got myself a new laptop, the wall only has 1 network jack, but its ok, i had
friends over before and used the wireless network adapter on my desktop
(connected to the wall) to peer to peer network using ad hoc.
i did so by reading the article
(www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_02april08.mspx )
few weeks back, and everything worked great
he had XP home, my desktop has XP Pro.
so my laptop came with XP home..... but its ok, decided to just set it up
first and reinstall a copy of XP later, got everything setup, WEP encrpytion
and everything (lots of people steal wireless bandwidth around here) and it
works fine..
but not perfectly fine
everything on my desktop works, from using MSN to chat, getting on
microsoft.com, playing computer games, using Skype and everything
however on my new laptop, i cannot connect to MSN messenger, cannot connect
to various websites (only google works and some other randoms), my game does
not connect to the server, and things like that

however, when my friend was over a few weeks back, this problem did not
occur, and im pretty sure nothing has changed since then,

what could be the source of my problem? and what else should i be looking
out for

thank you so much for ur time, i hope u can reply soon so i can fiture this
out and sleep ;__;

 

[Guest]

thought this problem was really werid so i fooled around a bit more
decided to switch things around and have the laptop be the source of the
internet connection (having its ethernet shared instead) amazingly it works
everything is working fine
but i dont not really want my laptop to be in control of the internet
connection for my desktop, meaning, i dont wanna have to keep my laptop
plugged in the wall (why get a laptop then)

anyways so i found out that if i did the SAME thing, but have the ethernet
plugged into the laptop, then everything works..

however it was strange with this new laptop, on my desktop, i just plug the
ethernet cable and have the TCP/IP settings set to automatic, and have the
DNS settings set on automatic

if i did that on my laptop, it hangs and says it was unable to retrieve an
IP address, so i decided to put the ip addres on the laptop in manually, and
then it was able to get on the internet, could that be a problem??

anyways i will try to figure this out, thank you for considering my problem

 

[Guest]

i dont know if this is relevant

both both computer tracert any website (even the ones that i supposively
cant get on from the laptop) to the same length

so i think the both computers can get on the internet

maybe it is not a network problem
hopefully these new details can help
but it is still confusing how MSN still refuses to work