I look forward to receiving your call

this has got me completely stumped now

well after numerous attempts by myself and Hengis, we finally got stumped by this one. just when I thought all was lost. I thought I owuld have one last fiddle with the settings,

all i done was disable the software that came with both the PCI and USB wireless adaptors, and then manually selected the IP addresses, then I noticed that the machines were seeing eachother in the network explorer as iI said before, but still nothing, so i enabled ICS. i can hear you thinking :icon_scra why I did that. but it paid off, after I enabled ICS it changed the IP for the LAN and the wireless, at this point I manually set the IP for the USB adaptor on the laptop... and hey presto,, I still cant see the shared folders due to permission restrictions, but the laptop is able to get online,

when the better half gets home i'm sure she will be over the moon.

one more question on tihs though.... is it possible to backup the network settings into a single file, rather than writing it down by hand. (oh how I dispise pens :P )