Upgrade a MBP to Leopard yesterday. I was having serious issues connecting to our home router with the machine.

Through a lot of trial and error I figured out that the Airport will only accept the password and connect to our router if I am sitting within 5 feet of the router itself.

Anyone have any suggestions short of a full format and reinstall? I know it's not the router as we have an identical MBP using the router as well as several other desktops.

9/28/2008 12:42:28 PM

Could be a hardware failure, i'd try downloading and installing the latest combo update though first.

9/28/2008 12:57:05 PM

^ Completely agree.

9/28/2008 1:25:47 PM

The combo upgrade is what broke it I think. I downloaded the update over the wireless network

Since then Ive been having the problems I explained above. I was also afraid it's a hardware failure, but I dont understand how a software upgrade breaks hardware

9/28/2008 1:39:05 PM

a lot of people had this problem (including me) it's all over the apple forums/macrumors

generally speaking, it's always a good idea to at least archive and install instead of doing an in-place upgrade... seems to work better. i always just reformat...

but yeah, reformatting fixed it for me.

9/28/2008 3:09:48 PM

yea thats a good idea, thx evan

9/28/2008 4:10:34 PM

here's an out-of-left field suggestion that would be software related -
Have you moved your "System Preferences" application out of the root /Applications folder? like into a sub-folder?

9/28/2008 4:26:44 PM

^

I have not tried that, but I will definitely give it a shot. Will that just bypass any wonky settings that may have gotten stuck?

9/28/2008 4:27:59 PM

^ actually, my post was ambiguous - I was asking if you had previously moved System Preferences into a subfolder before you ran into the problems. I was not suggesting that you do move it into a subfolder



I have run into several problems when moving Apple applications into /Applications/<SubFolders> when using Leopard, including several network-related problems specifically when moving System Preferences into a subfolder. So for now, I still have a folder-tree setup inside my Applications, but System Preferences is my only application that permanently lives in the root Applications directory.

Other problems you might run into if you move Apple software into subfolders is that Software Update seems to not work as well. For example, if you have an Applications/iLife folder and you start iPhoto, it might tell you that there is an update and to "Open Software Update" to get it, but when Software Update opens, it doesn't find the iPhoto update. If you move iPhoto back into /Applications, then run Software Update again, it will then find the update





[Edited on September 28, 2008 at 4:35 PM. Reason : .]

9/28/2008 4:34:13 PM

A simple thing to try before doing a reinstall is to trash your airport preferences (should be something like ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.airport) or something like that. Just moving them out of the preferences folder to your desktop and logging out and logging back in should be enough to get them rebuilt and see if that solves the problem.

9/28/2008 6:18:57 PM

Update: reformated the computer and installed Leopard fresh. Airport is still fucked.

Hooray for software breaking hardware Off to the genius bar

10/4/2008 4:39:30 PM