....

WPA support was released with 5.2 though...

WPA wasn't available to older Airport cards... when i tried to set WPA with my iBook the Admin Utility would say... Ummm no. If you do this you'll be screwed because you won't be able to use your Airport. Now this release supports ALL Airport cards.. but I'm not sure about the older basestations though : Now I feel a whole lot safer on my iBook

Let me try to connect my supposed industry standard 802.11g Powerbook to an industry standard access point using WEP and WEP Key indexes.

Nope, still can't connect with the update. Maybe one day Apple will get on the standards bandwagon and support the entire 802.11b/g standard, not just pieces of it. *sigh*

Now that both of my notebooks support WPA, I'm wondering if I should risk the 2.03 beta firmware for my Netgear WGR614 wireless router (which adds WPA to the router). My experiences to date on firmware updates to this router have been less than positive: I've fallen back to version 1100 twice.

"Let me try to connect my supposed industry standard 802.11g Powerbook to an industry standard access point using WEP and WEP Key indexes.

Nope, still can't connect with the update."

What are you talking about? What products are you using?

This is an update for Apple's Airport products. If you are not using Airport products then obviously this update will not fix your problem with whatever product you are using.

I'm trying to connect my Powerbook with Airport Extreme to a standards complaint 3rd party 802.11b access point. This update did add things to the Airport Extreme support on my Powerbook, so I was hopeful it has been fixed. But it hasn't. Apple still does not support multiple WEP keys, and a key index to select the active key.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=183480

See that thread for more info.

Using alternate key indexes for the WEP key is false security and not part of the interoperability certification process.

Apple does support 802.11b and 802.11g-Standards. I use my iBook G4 with the Asus WL-500G-Router (802.11g). Still, the standard is not achieving true compatability, especially with all these sub-100 €-wlan-routers and all the variations of new wlan-chips. E.g. i can connect to the asus-router with my ibook (and print via lpr), but i cannot connect with the pc-laptop my father-in-law bought recently (802.11g with Intersil Nitro Chip) and i could connect an ibook G3 only with WEP disabled. So for everything that goes beyond basic 802.11b without encryption, compatability is sometimes a problem. Look at pc forums how many routers have problems with centrino notebooks. This is of course not acceptable, but reality.