I recently set up my home with an 802.11b wireless network using a Linksys Wireless cable/dsl gateway and Linksys wireless NICs. Things went pretty well, although once everything was installed I noticed the following problem:

I would be using the internet and every so often (maybe every 40 minutes) I would lose the ability to connect to either the internet or the router. I could solve this by trying to re-connect a couple of times. Needless to say, it was pretty annoying. But I think I found the cause:

Big surprise, it looks like it was Microsoft's fault. Windows XP has a service called Wireless Zero Configuration that finds a wireless network and connects to it. I guess that after connecting it continues to look for a better network, and something about looking for a better network occasionally causes it to drop the current connection.

So the solution is to let the Wirless Zero Configuration service detect the network, and once the connection is established, shut down the service. There are 2 ways to do this. Way 1: click start > programs > administrative tools >services. Scroll down to Wirless Zero... right click it and select stop. Of course, that's a lot of clicking to do everytime you boot up Windows XP (which you have to do a lot to recover from crashes. blah), which brings me to... Way 2: create a batch file with the following command: sc stop WZCSVC. Name it whatever you like, then you just have to run it after your connection is established. (SC is a windows/system32 program that lets you start/stop/configure services from the command line.)

Ok, so that's the solution i've found. I had a lot of trouble finding this answer, so I thought I should contribute it to the collective knowledge of the web.