a friend of mine had issues like this when i set up wifi  for him. his ps3 could connect from the other side of the house but his laptop that was right  next to the router wouldn't. so i just gave up and connected it with an ethernet cable. in the  end i got it to work but I'm not entirely sure how. basically i turned everything off then on  again a few times  and finally the laptop  decided to talk to the router wirelessly.


about  the belkin wifi card, have a look around on the interwebs to see if anyone else is having similar issues. its unlikely  that belkin delibirately limit the range of the card for non-belkin routers but possible.