Routed

Yesterday, my wife and daughter went out with her mother, leaving me at the house with my laptop, talking to the net through the router we'd put in last year. Not two minutes later, my laptop lost the connection to the router, and we haven't been able to get it back. Turns out its really hard to figure out is it the router/is it the laptop when you have only the one of each to test with. We've tentatively concluded that its the router, because we can 'see' other networks with the laptop. Most have a red X through the network name. which I think means 'weak signal'; one doesn't. (The Help function is so....minimal.)

Once or twice, we've gotten the laptop to see our network with a just-barely-there signal (and this, three feet from the router antenna), but then the signal's disappeared. The router sits there, blinking happily, and certainly looks as it its working.

What we can't figure out is how it failed (assuming. of course, that it did). There's a faint possibility that somehow, signing off the browser, my daughter shut down something else, too, but we've cold started the laptop, the router, and the desktop, and nada. Since my MIL's home has everything running through the modem -- tv, phone, internet -- we're reluctant to cold-start that, too (though that'd be the obvious thing to try).

We're at a loss. Quite frustrating.
================
Update: I have NetStumbler on the laptop. It can see two 'red x' networks plus one 'not red x' network in the area. It cannot see our network. So, I'm thinking, that routers not getting squat out. Bad hardware, bad antenna, something like that...