The other night, I set out to harden my wireless connection security on my home router by following commonly accepted wisdom and best practices that have been passed down from person to person. Namely, the 2 biggest changes I made were to change my SSID and quit broadcasting the SSID. Setting up my MacBook was about as obvious and painless as could be. However, things did not fare so well on my fairly new work laptop (Lenovo T61).

My wireless connection in the tray area would immediately put an X on it and tell me things weren't connected. However, I could still browse, still had a valid IP address, etc., etc. After about 8-10 minutes, the connection would finally shut down and tell me that it couldn't connect to my work's wireless connection.

After a lot of googling, I came across this article that talked about wireless network issues in a little more depth. It turns out that the Windows Zero Configuration service did not like the fact that I had hidden my SSID so it was trying to be "helpful" by searching for other networks out there that it could see.

In the end, I was able to leave my SSID hidden (despite the fact that it doesn't really matter much that it's hidden) and leave Windows Zero Configuration running. I just had to uncheck the "Enable IEEE 802.1x authentication for this network" option in Wireless Networks | Preferred Networks | Properties | Authentication. Who knew?