frequent crashes with US Robotics 8054 22MB/s wireless card

[Massimo Lencioni]

Hi,

I have installed a small wireless home network (ad hoc without router or
access point) running on Windows XP, including 2 pc's and a laptop. Each
machine has a US Robotics 8054 22 MB/s wireless card (laptop/PC versions
respectively). I never had any problems with connectivity, sharing
Internet access and normal file sharing. However, I am experiencing
increasingly frequent crashes at apparently random moments on all machines
(blue screen -> reboot). The minidump log ALWAYS mentions an error in the
USRWLAN component.
This has been going on for months now. US Robotics Tech support say they
don't have any record of this type of problem and suggested I'd try and
eliminate all other devices one by one to exclude the possibility of
conflicts. This didn't lead me to any solution. I recently installed
Windows XP SP2, but the problem is still there.
I would be happy to buy different wireless cards, if I could be sure that
this is a typical US Robotics problem, but I am afraid the same problems
might occur with cards from some other brand. Does anyone have any
recommendations for me?

Thanks in advance,

Massimo Lencioni

 

[Brian Wehrle [MSFT]]

Massimo,

This proprietary product is used to achieve higher throughput and is very
specific to this card and this program.
While I cannot endorse other products, I would invite you to uninstall this
program and use the Windows XP Wireless Zero Configuration Service.

While it will not be able to give you the added functionality of a 2x speed
jump, I doubt you can actually get this throughput anyways, so I don't
think that you will see a large performance difference. Then again,
according to your network and the type of traffic that it generates, you
just might see a big drop.

I do reccomend that you try it out. Uninstall the USR software, turn on the
Wireless Zero Configuration service and configure the wireless adapter
through the Control Panel -> Network Connections page, opening the
properties page of the Wireless Adapter. This configuration should be
straight-forward. You can add the adhoc network using the Add button, to
add it to the Preferred Networks list. The network will automatically be
connected to when it is range.

Brian