A friend of mine brought over an old laptop [IBM T40 type 2373] & asked me for some help. He had been using it wirelessly but was having some error messages that were preventing him from getting on line. At this point the laptop could view close by wireless networks including mine. Anyway I proceeded to address the issue, finding that the laptop had no anti-virus, anti-malware, nor any windows xp updates such as SP3. So I installed SP3, Malware bytes, which found 472 bad files, CCleaner, which took forever to clean. So after doing all this cleanup, I hook the laptop up to my wired network & was now able to get on line with no problem.
However, now the wireless feature will not see any local networks now. When I try to do a repair, the icon in the system tray which has a red X over it, has a little window that opens & says there one or more networks in range, click to open & view. When I do that, a window opens & states there are no networks in range. I have checked the network card in device mgr. & it is ok. I even found a driver for it & reinstalled same. Bottom line, it will not see any wireless nets at all. Sorry for the long post ..... BTW, I even disabled the wired network think that might be an issue...