I live in an area with several access points, and I’m from time to time running Windows XP from home. One of the first things that I noticed was that when the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) client in Windows XP is in the proximity of two wireless access points, and one of them is broadcasting its Service Set Identifier (SSID) and the other one not, your computer will always connect to the access point that is broadcasting its SSID. This occurs regardless of the preference order of the networks that are configured on the Preferred Networks list.

I have never experienced anything similar with Zeta, Linux or MacOS X.

Microsoft has published information about how to solve the problem on their support pages .