wireless network/router problems

I'm setting up a network with 3 PC's and a wireless-enabled laptop. Not a great problem as everything has gone fine with the hard-wired connections to the PC's and the router.

BUT... I cant for the life of me figure out how to get the laptop connected to the internet via its wireless USB device. It detects and connects to the wireless network fine and the router sees and allocates it an IP address fine as well.

As well as the wireless connection in "Network Connections" there is a 1394 firewire port (which always seems to connect automatically for some reason), and a normal NIC socket. I've disabled both of these in an attempt to force it to connect to the internet via the wireless connection. Laptop is running IE at the moment (user is not too happy about changing) which pops up a window saying that its unable to find an internet connection every time you try to access a website. I've tried manually configuring an IP and DNS server but still no luck.

I think it must be a local setting on the laptop but dont have a clue what.
Any ideas on how to sort this?? :confused:

Have you tried hardwiring the laptop to the router or modem yet to see if it can access the Internet directly? That would help to narrow down the problem. And of course make sure you don't have any firewalls either on the laptop or in the router that could be blocking Internet access.

I recently had to reload my mother-in-laws laptop because she downloaded a nasty spyware program that took over her connection and when she and my wife tried to remove it themselves using AdAware it deleted the spyware program but unfortunately in doing so removed the only way for me to remove the spyware properly as the spyware modifies files needed for Internet access.

So essentially I could get her laptop on the wireless network I have set up but I could not access the Internet no matter what. It drove me crazy for an entire day until I traced the problem back to spyware.

The only thing I can immediatly think of is a firewall blocking the internet access. With the IP adress, subnet mask and prefered DNS servers set, then I can't really think of anything else which would immediatly block internet access :p

its a brand new straight-out-of-the-box dell and it hasn't ever been on the internet before so i'd discount spyware.

I think i'll try the direct NIC connection option - that sounds like a plan - but I think the whole problem is caused because IE cant seem to see the wireless connection.

IE doesn't really care where the connection is as long as there is one. If it is straight out of the box it should work fine on the laptop side of things. I would look closely at the routers internal set up. I know with mine it has options to block specific computers using specific ports although not by default.