Sometime in the murky mists long ago, I was messing around "cleaning up" my T61 running XP. It has various Lenovo utilities for connecting to networks, allowing new drivers to be downloaded, etc., etc. 98% of which I never used. In the process of cleaning out cruft from the Registry, or updating some drivers, or something, I broke the "Access Connections" WiFi tool. No amount of reinstalling or doing the usual things would fix it.

Ok, just use the standard Windows Networking instead.

No, you can't do that because the magic WiFi tab in the Windows configuration that lets you check "Let Windows handle WiFi connections" is missing. Mess around, mess around.

Reinstall the Access Connections tools.

Still no worky, but at least the WiFi tab is back, so Winders can handle it.

I read somewhere that to fix it one had to remove all the WiFi drivers, update the BIOS, reinstall the AC software and drivers in some particular order, and even then there were many who complained that it didn't help.

I haven't had those problems with WiFi under Ubuntu, but I usually punted and used fixed IP addresses rather than figuring out historical issues with DHCP, etc. I sympathize. I hope you have it figured out well enough to connect reliably.

Cheers,
Scott.