Hello everybody

Hope someone can help with this one.  I'm currently in Cambodia and there's a real nice Italian guy staying at the same hotel who hasn't been able to connect since reaching the country.  He's just had a month in Laos and a month in Vietnam where he had no problem.  He took it down to the local shop, it connected straight away no problems, but every wi-fi hotspot - our hotel, all the bars and restaurants around - nothing.  He's running XP3 same as me, and I've compared properties and they are exactly the same.  One local techie told him to uninstal Norton (which he foolishly did, took a couple of hours on the Norton live chat with someone to give me his serial/key (which he obviously doesn't carry around with him) and a link to a file to finish off the installation.  So I'm back to scratch.  I've installed Firefox (and converted him away from IE) and the icon shows connected and Excellent Connection, but in firefox I just get 'Looking up...' on the bottom status bar line.  Exactly the same thing happened when he was in another town in Cambodia last week.  He's reduced to going to Internet Cafe's and plugging into LAN to get access.  I can't understand how it worked OK in the shop, but it won't anywhere else.  Really nice bloke, I'd like to help him but I've reached the limit of my knowledge.  Won't put all the details up unless required, it's one of those small Acer netbooks and every router he tries to connect to is a different brand in different places, so I can't see that being the problem.  I repeat (again) that it worked when he took it to the local shop - they're stumped, have no idea why it isn't working anywhere else.

Any advice or help on this would be much appreciated - he is planning on staying in Cambodia for several months and there's free wi-fi everywhere, but he's having to pay to plug in at points in internet cafe's.

Thanks in advance