Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

wife was issued an XP pro laptop.  She claims she brought it home,
opened IE, and it connected to the WEB.  Is this reasonable?

WEP64 should have at least kept the XP box from passing traffic.

Wireless encryption or some authentication of some sort would block traffic from entering - and passing through - your router to the internet and your LAN (couldn't even send a print job to a network-attached printer).

I thought the posts from you and Neil below - plus Bob's recent post - had to do with using a MAC address system to keep out "innocent wanderers".  But it seems that activating any security that changes the available network listing from public to private would keep them from accessing either your LAN or internet connection.  So how would the white list keep them out more?

Hmmm... This shouldn't be. Check that the dopey Windows firewall
isn't turned on. (Kill it from Control Panel.)

Yes it was, and now I am connected.