WiFi setup question- Strange setup problems!

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Hi All, another long one for you! This had me stumped for a few days....

I had a strange thing going on when helping my Brother set up his Xbox360, Wii and PC onto his wireless network.

the PC was no problem. the Wii and X360 however, would not work.

to get around the problem he had bought 1 standard Wireless USB dongle and 1 Nintendo wifi adapter, one for the 360, one for the Wii. [edit: he didn't actually NEED these when I had finished setting everything up properly...]

now, I went around, sure that I could get them both running fine through the router, so I set up the wireless network as normal, used WEP, passphrase "123456789" (not that exact one ;) )

Now I set his system up EXACTLY the same as my system at home, which should work great since mine does. But it didn't. the WII and 360 refused to pass the connection test and wouldnt get a valid IP. I was stumped! So, I tried one drastic thing... I swapped in my router from home. At this point his setup had exactly the same hardware and software settings so there was no reason for it not to work. It never worked...

Finally after two days I tried something... I typed in the key from "Key ID 1" instead of my passphrase. Bingo, X360 and Wii both connect.

Now I take HIS router home with me, to use it with my equipment, only now MY equipment won't work, and when I type in the actual key from "Key ID 1" instead of my passphrase, bingo, the systems start working again.

Question: Why did this happen? the setup was working fine at my house with the passphrase being keyed into every peice of equipment that needed it. Why did the same setup not work at my bro's house, and why when I swapped routers did BOTH networks break and have me use the key ID instead of the passphrase? It never used to work like that!!?

I have no idea, but I don't think there's even a place in the Wii config panel to input a passphrase. You have to enter the key. I tried entering a passphrase myself and it told me the Wii told me it was an invalid key.

My wii (before I swapped the router to my brothers.) was connecting fine when I used the passphrase... but quite obviously I can't use the passphrase anymore. My X360 worked before I got the Wii too.

If I was to bring my router back home though, it works! Dya think the router is doing some "AI" on the key do you? but if that was the very very unlikely case, the equipment at my bro's would work.

*shrug* I dunno. I'd like to understand how the system was working before though...!