Hey all,

Got a weird problem here that I wanted to see if anybody could shed some light on. I just got a new Lenovo T61 laptop with the Intel 4965AGN Wifi module. It works great everywhere right out of the box with NetworkManager (with or without WPA2 encryption); I've used it at my house, friend's houses, and many Starbucks and the connection never drops.

Except at the University I attend... the school network shows up in NetworkManager, but the system slows to a crawl whenever I am in the vicinity of school access points. Every 10 seconds or so, the mouse cursor freezes and all hard drive activity stops like it just had a hard crash; then it wakes up a few seconds later. It renders the system unusable and the only solution is to disable the Wifi radio by physically switching it off. This *only* happens at the university.

Incidentally, I have similar issues in Windows Vista, although it seems to cope with it a little better. I can typically connect in Vista, but the connection is very unreliable (disconnects randomly and cannot reconnect until a reboot). I checked the Event Viewer (system log) and I get thousands of messages from the Wifi adapter only when connected to this network. I've done a Google search for the error but didn't pull any results.

I've talked to other people and they don't have this problem. Moreover, I was able to connect to this same network without problems on my previous Compaq V2000 laptop, so it's not that the university has faulty hardware or anything. So I'm stumped.

Any ideas why my laptop and this particular network can't get along?

Yeah. I've had similar same problems at my University. I'm running a Dell Inspiron 1420 with a Broadcom wireless card, and I have the same issues. My Linux machine has never crashed on my home network... only on the school's (in both Xubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10).

Of course... on the Vista side, my machine always crashes. But that's to be expected.

Unlike your issue, though, the crashes are totally abrupt. The system never slows down... it just dies on me.

I wish I could help more, but all I've done to solve the issue is bear the pain and put up with the freezes. I'd like to see what anyone else has to say about this, too.