Trouble getting to "Acquiring Network Address"

I wonder if anyone else has had this problem. I just got a beautiful new notebook, Sharp's M4000 Widenote. I am somewhat familiar with connecting wirelessly. At home I connect through a router attached to our cable modem. I can connect at home, most of the time. My problem is that when I try to connect to the any unsecured network, (such as the free hot spot at my school, or our city hall), my computer attempts to connect, but it never goes through. Eventually, it stops trying and the "connect" button becomes clickable again.

I notice that when I do connect at home, "acquiring network address" is one of the steps displayed right before it successfully connects. That step is never displayed in the instances when I cannot connect to unsecured networks. What compunds this problem is that every once in a while, rarely, it will connect. Like right now, which allows me to write the forum asking for help.

This is all very frustrating because I've been saving for such a long time to buy this lovely computer that I thought would allow me to become a mobile warrior. Can someone help me?

Thank you so much<
Carol A

thanks for the help. I did install the driver, though it was the same one I originally had. I haven't been able to experiment and see if this resolves the problem. I don't think this is the solution however. I was just wondering if anyone else had had this happen. Anyone?

if you have a firewall or an antivirus try disabling that because sometimes it blocks the connection form the computer to the Access Point ... since you can connect to your own network and able to access the internet maybe there's a problem with that network where you're trying to connect ...