A fix for Windows Vista not connecting to a wireless network

Today my girlfriend's laptop (running Windows Vista) would not connect to my wireless network. It connected to her uni wireless network fine and was connecting to mine fine up until now. It had recently been upgraded to Service Pack 2, so this may have triggered the problem.

I unsuccessfully tried

• rebooting,
• removing the access point from its list of 'remembered' points, and
• reinstalling the wireless card driver.

After some Googling the solution that worked for me was to create a new 32-bit DWORD value called ArpRetryCount in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\

and leaving its value at 0. After rebooting it connected as normal.

Here is a .reg file to automatically apply the fix.