Hi guys. I feel a bit guilty for coming in as a noob to ask for help, but I promise I'll stick around and post some more!

We finally made the move off dial-up last month, staying with Paradise, and I was keen to set up a home wireless network. I was pretty keen to set up a wireless network and went out and grabbed a router. So here's the story so far:

I bought a D-Link router on the advice of the Dick Smith guy. I was going to buy the Netgear one that was $20 cheaper, but he told me it wouldn't work with cable. Turns out it would have, which is what I'd thought, but that's neither here nor there. I went home with my D-Link router (sorry, can't remember the model number - $150 at Dick Smith, I'll look it up later) and set about creating a network. I followed the instructions in the book, and then found whatever step it was that they'd left out of the book, and voila! - a network. Then I managed to get the internet working over it. So far so good. Now I secured my network with WPA-PSK security. Still so far so good.

Then on the weekend of Sat 21/Sun 22 April, the connection started dropping in and out, then just went altogether. I waited for it to come back, but it didn't. The network was still fine, but the internet just wouldn't connect (we use IE6). My wife started getting antsy and got me to ring TCL tech support. I got onto a tech in under 5 minutes (a record!) and then had to pretend that I didn't have a wireless network as they don't support them. He talked me through setting up my internet connection again directly through the modem. So the internet was back, but when I went back to try and get it to connect through my network, it just wouldn't.

At this point I'd like to acknowledge that I should have tried unplugging the modem for a minute and plugging it back in before I called tech support, but I seem to have a mental block for the simple solutions...

Now I started trying to go through all my network settings to find out why the internet wouldn't connect through it. I didn't document any of what I've done, which was another rookie mistake, and then I committed the ultimate booboo - I changed the router setting to stop assigning IP addresses, so now I can't even access the routervia my network. So I reset the router and started again from scratch, but this time it doesn't want to play ball and I can't get my network set up.

To complicate matters further, the laptop that I'm using to do all this still keeps finding my old WPA-PSK secured network, but of course I can't connect to it. So my question is really: how do I blow away everything I've done and start again from scratch? And is there a guide somewhere for doing this that has all the little steps and tricks that aren't in the router instructions? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the uber-long post.