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I was wondering if I might get some support for a task that we are doing at my company.

We are currently moving all of our office APs to a hidden SSID with WPA2-PSK, AES.

The hell of it is, it looks like we might have to go to SP3 for this, and that means individual downloads and installs for hundreds of laptops that we have around here.

However, I could swear that I am running the same at home with SP2.

I have found two Hot fixes, KB907405 and KB917021 that are supposed to offer additional support for WPA2 and hidden SSID networks.

Right now I am trying to test this, but I am not getting much help from the network group as they seem to be set in stone for the need of XP3 to be installed first. We have one laptop that does have SP3 installed, and one that has the two mentioned hot fixes installed. I cant get either one to work right now, and the one with SP3 was working this weekend. So, while I am waiting on the network guys (which are in a totally different city) to see if they turned off or blocked anything after the initial setup from this weekend, I was wondering if anyone could give me any first hand experience suggestions, or if this could be confirmed.

Why was the decision made to hide the SSID? Your case is one of many as to why not to hide the SSID. There are some legitimate reasons to hide the SSID, but security isn't one of them.

Sorry this doesn't directly answer your question, but the solution is fairly simple. :)

GT

I am not sure as to why the decision was made. It was "above my pay grade", I believe right now, since we have not implemented WPA2 completely, they are hiding the SSID from the end users so we dont get tickets about users not able to connect.

I was able to answer my own question once I got home, I verified that at home I am running WPA2-PSK, AES on XP SP2. Turned off SSID just to have a similar setup, which I was 99% sure was no problem, but i do have times where I second guess my self on the what seems to be the most simple tasks.

Pretty much disregard everything I said in my OP.

Out of the box, XP SP2 does not support WPA/WPA2. This can seem kind of surprising until you remember when XP was released :)

If it was working for you at home, it is probably because you have one of the patches released later that added the support. Most third-party PC makers obviously add it so that people can connect to their networks at home. I think this is the latest version of that update: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917021/

But if you have to install an update and reboot machines anyway, you might as well go with SP3, as even that is already over a year old.

We dealt with this issue in a big way when we rolled out our network a couple years ago. We had to install an update on a lot of machines, as the typical client was XP SP2 without the WPA patch.