Too hard for a network admin

Macmove.com posted a little anecdote about life with Windows:

Shortly after lunch today my daughter, age 4, declared that she wanted to go to noggin.com to play some of the games there. "And I want to do it on the computer in the family room" she declared.

Her "usual" computer is a grape tray loading iMac. It is not connected to the network at home as there is no cat5 run to her room, nor do the tray loading iMacs have AirPort card capability. The computer in the family room is a Windows XP machine running on some left over P3 600 hardware and an ATI All-In-Wonder card for doing some DVR duties. It is connected to the home network with a SMC PCI wireless 802.11b card.

It doesn't get much use other than a bit of recording, playing an occasional MP3, and a few Windows only games for my daughter. It had been at least two months since it had seen any use.

Since its last use I had upgraded to an Airport Extreme base station and was using WPA encryption. On boot-up the Windows machine could not log into the Novell network because it was unable to negotiate WPA, or so I thought. After some futzing with switching WPA to WEP on the base station, then ultimately turing off encryption all together, I realized that the problem was that the SMC card was not updating its settings when I clicked the "Apply" button. For about 15 minutes I would change a setting, reboot, see if it worked... all to no avail. I then went to my personal XP machine and downloaded the newest drivers from SMC, removed the existing driver and installing the new one. Even that didn't go right. The installer kept looking for a file called C10.drv, which I could not find anywhere in the driver's installer directories. Eventually I resorted to doing a "find file" on the computer and found a version of C10 in /windows/system32/drivers/. The installer seemed to like it and I was able to get the computer on-line so my daughter could get to noggin.com. Total expired time, 45 minutes.... AND I'M A NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR. How the average Joe puts up with all of this and manages to get any work done is really quite beyond my comprehension....