The travails of home wireless

Recently my wireless at home has been exhibiting strange behavior - the laptop makes the connection and works fine for about a minute, then network applications just stop working, though XP reports that it has an excellent wireless connection. The Airport management software (I use Freebase on my Windows XP laptop) doesn't see the Airport on its scanning, but if I manually tell it what IP address the Airport is on I can connect fine.

So I spend several days futzing around with settings on the Airport, making sure that I can connect fine with a wired connection on the same port on my hub, etc. Then I bring the Airport in to work and let my colleague Mark McNair take a look at it - works fine for him - and he even updates my firmware for me (there's apparently no way to update an Airport from a Windows machine).

So I bring it back home, plug it in - same deal. Finally I have the bright idea to disable the Internet Connection Firewall on the wireless connection - voila - everything works fine.

I have no idea why it worked ok for months with the ICF turned on and all of a sudden stopped working. But now that I have it working again, I'm not messing with it.