Win 98 box not seeing the router

Hello

Been trying to help a friend get his win 98 tower to see a Netgear router, even Netgear was stumped.

I've tried everything I can think of, disabling firewall, release/renew, obtain an ip automatically, went through the cd install procedure, no problem with the network card as he can plug into the dsl modem and see the Internet just fine.

He got a Dell laptop with the router and can browse wirelessly just fine also, so the modem and the router are communicating.

Tried different cable, different port, called Netgear: they said to call Dell Called his ISP: they said to call Netgear

I should also add that we can't log into the router either from the win98 machine.

So any other ideas we could try?

Thanks for any replies!!

I've see a few cases where IE version was not new enough to access the routers admin, but connects and works just fine. Some routers require java in order to work.