Luckily, my wife's machine froze before she could print the legal reference, so I dodged the bullet, because, alas, I was unable to get my desktop to share Internet access with the laptop. The only problem with the 3Com software is that it relies on the Microsoft Win98SE Internet Sharing Software, which is notoriously difficult to operate. At one point, I was in a frustrating cycle in which the ISS software would talk to the other machine only when it also cut off my cable modem Web access. Restoring Web access only served to kill the ISS function.

Now, I had to think about the implications of this very carefully. In a case like this, where Microsoft is the root of my home networking problem, and my wife is seeking legal recourse, does that mean I have to call Bill Gates as a witness in the divorce proceedings? His testimony in the government's anti-trust trial made Bill Clinton's grand jury performance look heartfelt and sincere. Do I really want Gates on my side?

I raced for an alternative.

I tried the NetGear Internet sharing software, but it didn't want to work either, though I suspect by this time those damned Microsoft ISS drivers had left enough ugly vestiges in the registry to screw up most incoming software. And I sure didn't want to reinstall Windows. In my house, my wife warns my daughter when such a crisis occurs, because it turns me from a loving father to a seething, bitter monster. “Don't bother Daddy, honey. He's reinstalling Windows.” She promptly shrinks back to her room.

To reiterate. I am such a slug. And the wife doesn't mind keeping the pressure on.

“A San Diego wife was granted custody of her children, the house and stock portfolio because her husband was addicted to eBay,” my wife read from her screen as I struggled with a dodgy USB plug on my laptop. While an online addiction was not quite in the same league as my wife's complaint of “bandwidth deprivation,” it seemed too close. All my wife needed now was a slimy lawyer and well-worded press release and I could be the next Internet horror story that Tom Brokaw smirks at on the evening news.

I was desperate, so even though I dislike its setup routines and the stupidly inconvenient design of the USB phoneline adapter (it looks like a showy World's Fair exhibition hall), I tried the Intel AnyPoint unit and its software. Frankly, Intel has saved my bacon now in both generations of home network tests I've conducted. Its drive mapping and Internet sharing software is the easiest to use and repair when and if anything goes awry. It proved true here, because I had Web and drive sharing up and running within five minutes. The only kludge with the Intel software is that it won't install properly unless it thinks you have an Intel adapter in place. The only way I found to trick the Intel software to load was manually replacing the 3Com driver for my desktop's PCI phoneline card with the Intel driver. Success.

Internet access across the 2.0 spec phoneline devices proved more than fast enough. I was able to stream Web video at lower resolutions just fine on the remote laptop. As I found earlier with the NetGear unit, file transfers are much, much faster now than in the 1.0 version of these devices. All in all, you're not seeing anything like the 10Mbps speeds they advertise, let alone the performance of a true Ethernet network, but I am overjoyed with the general usefulness of the HomePNA 2.0 standard for most everyday uses.