I have no idea what happened but I couldn't get on-line at my hotel in the Chicago suburbs until this morning. The D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650 WiFi card that I have has been flaking out ever since I took it out of my laptop to put the laptop in the bag, with the card losing power occasionally while I sit and type. That, however, was not the core issue with getting on the hotel's WiFi network.

I couldn't get the operating system on my laptop to recognize the network although my signal strength meter on the screen was showing about 70 percent of maximum strength. The instructions I had from the hotel was to set a specific SSID and turn off WEP, and I had done that. No idea why it didn't work at one point and now it's fine. Go figure.