James, I'm unsure of the answer to your wireless issue, but I do have some input in regards to shutting off the system safely when it hangs. I am not 100% on this, but I remember reading somewhere that just pressing the power button on a linux/unix like system can potentially damage the hard disk drive(s). I believe someone replied recommending you to switch to the shell (Ctrl+Alt+F1) "you can actually use F1 through F6  in the previous command" After switching to the shell, type at the prompt  "shutdown -hr now " without the quotes If you cannot get this far, there is the wonderful "Sys Rq" key. This is sometimes also the "prt sc" or Print Screen key. On some laptop systems this could potentially be a "function" key as well. Going on. If you can't get the system to drop to a shell and issue the shutdown -hr now command, try the following: Press and Hold (SysRq+Alt+R,E,I,S,U,B) and the system should magically reboot. You are holding the SysRq+Alt keys, while pressing REISUB, in that order. I'll leave the reasons for what this key sequence actually does for everyone who does not know to research. Anyway, hope this is good for my first post in the mailing group. I look forward to attending a meeting and maybe creating a South Suburbs Ubuntu Group for those around the Joliet area. I apologize for any spelling and grammar errors, as I am not an English major. Good luck with the 2Wire problem. Cheers, Andy <div class="gmail_quote">On Feb 11, 2008 11:46 PM, James White <<a href="mailto:jwhite1202@gmail.com">jwhite1202@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Does anyone know why 2Wire occasionally looses it's connection and then just hangs?  Once I finally got my wireless connection going (thx Chicago Ubuntu team), I now run into the occasional problem of the wireless network becoming lost and there is nothing you can do to get it back.  The password screen pops up, but when you add the pwd back, it just hangs.  I cannot even shut the computer down to restart.  I have to remove the battery to get the thing to finally shutdown.  Yes, I know this is not safe but I would still be waiting for the laptop to shut down if I depended upon the laptop to shut itself down :-) when it has this issue.  I looked on the Ubuntu forums and did not see anything specific.  I'm still learning to use the forums so I apologize in advanced if I missed something. Thx, James -- Ubuntu-us-chicago mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-us-chicago@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-us-chicago@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-chicago" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-chicago</a> </blockquote></div>