Wireless routers will broadcast what's called an SSID (service set identifier). It can get pretty technical, but for these purposes it's just the name of the wireless network you've set up.
What it means is that even if your sitting right next to the wireless router, chances are the network won't show up on your list of surrounding available networks because said wireless router isn't "broadcasting" it's identity to the general public.
This article should help
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Originally Posted by the relevant part
As it turns out, if you use the Microsoft Windows XP SP 1-based Wireless Zero Configuration service (my note: I imagine that Vista runs some updated variation/version of this service, right?)to manage your wireless (aka, the "built-in client"), you're probably running into a horrible bug that Microsoft calls "behavior by design." The gist of this is as follows: if your wireless network is set to not broadcast your SSID, Microsoft's wireless manager will periodically drop your non-broadcasting WiFi connection in response to the presence of a broadcasting SSID-based network. You won't fully associate with that network, but the service will pop-up and tell you that there are multiple wireless networks to join, even if you have removed all other networks from your preferred settings (this contradicts Microsoft's report, which says it only affects preferred networks). The upshot of this is that you, the user who changes his default SSID and then sets it to not broadcast (as most security guides, and most hardware setup guides will tell you to do), now gets dropped off your network when you neighbor shows up with his new D-Link wireless router and not only fails to change the SSID from default to something else, but does not turn off broadcasting, either. While many may debate the security benefits of disabling SSID broadcast, it is a practice that is recommended by most manufacturers of wireless products
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My suggestion (and part of their solution as well) is to just enable SSID broadcasting on the router. Not broadcasting is a pretty weak way to secure a wireless network anyway and considering the problems you're having, I would think the tradeoff for convenience over security would be acceptable.
I'm not sure why rebooting helps, but I imagine that once the system boots up the connection with your router is established at once and then is dropped accordingly for whatever reason. I also imagine that if you were to try and use the network sharing diagnostic center...mess thingy that Vista offers you could conceivably jumpstart the connection as well, although that would require some experimentation on your part.