Windows 7 came finally into my life when I got a new work PC. No chance of getting XP... sadly.
One of the first problems I ran into appeared when trying to connect this Windows 7 machine to a (somewhat old) 3com OfficeConnect WiFi access point. This is an AP that has properly established WiFi connections with all sorts of old and new equipment (iPhones, Android smart phones, very old Nokia N95 phones, XP PCs, Macs, .... anything). But now this Windows 7 machine would have lots of trouble connecting to the AP. Sometimes it would establish the connection after 5 minutes trying, but mostly it just didn't connect. The Windows 7 system does connect to other APs, though.
The Windows 7 network troubleshooter was of no help at all.
In trying to solve my problem, I installed Intel's ProSet Wireless utility (the machine has an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 networking chip) with the hopes that it would manage the connection to the AP better than Windows 7 did. No luck.... but at least this nice tool does provide quite some technical details about the connection it is trying to establish. So I saw that Windows 7 was trying to assign an IPv6 address to the network connection with the AP. This AP does not have IPv6 support, so I don't understand why Windows 7 is so keen in using IPv6 with it.
Nevertheless, I thought this might be the issue.... so I disabled the IPv6 stack in the Windows 7 wireless network adapter configuration (see screenshot below), and that did it: Now Windows 7 connects to this AP normally in a few seconds, and a proper IPv4 connection gets established.
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