Thanks for your input and suggestions.
It is my daughter’s notebook laptop and she is currently in Spain. She is renting a router made by Astoria Networks (I believe a German outfit) and her Windows XP does not have a driver for wireless connection to that router. Windows update did not install that driver! But her cable connection via ethernet works so all is not lost.
If she can’t connect wirelessly, it’s not because there’s a missing driver specific to that particular brand of router. There’s no such thing as brand-specific wifi connection drivers for an 802.11 wifi router.
Either she doesn’t have the correct driver for the internal wireless card in her laptop, or the router is on a different channel or frequency than her laptop. European routers have a few more channels on the b/g spectrum than US routers, so she may have to get the channel on the router set to one between 1 and 11 (it might be up on 12-15). Or, the router might be an 802.11a, and her laptop only has a b/g wifi adapter. If it’s an “a” vs “b/g” problem, she can get a USB adapter for almost nothing that will let her communicate over the router’s frequency.