Does anyone know anything about modem encryption types or knows someone who might? The other day I started putting two and two together and I've gotten 3.5, so I'm hoping someone might help me find that other half and make deviantART finally cooperate.

Let me explain...

Some time ago, about a month or two , Dad got fed up with paying a few dollars a month to rent a modem from Time Warner so he turned it in and bought his own, the same exact brand, etc. (it's a Motorola Surfboard something or other), and set it up. He was having troubles getting the passcode to set when he was trying to get WEP encryption, but when he tried WPA, everything worked out fine. And I've been able to connect to the internet ever since.

But I quickly learned that not everything worked. dA wouldn't always load images or even the CSS. I wasn't able to connect to the chat at Kongregate. I later learned that my DS Lite couldn't connect to a WPA encrypted modem. The other day I was trying to go on iScribble for the first time, and, I now realize, like Kongregate, it was telling me my firewall might have been preventing it from connecting. When I was trying to get iScribble to work, I went so far as to completely disable Norton (which a friend of mine has to do with Spore, otherwise it tells her that a firewall is preventing Spore from opening), and that didn't do anything.

And I had a thought. Could the WPA encryption be acting/viewed as a firewall? I've been asking my Dad to change the encryption for a while now so I can trade over WiFi, but since he's a truck driver and is only home two days of the week, our weekends often run out before he has the chance. But if this is what's causing my problems, I could always try to do it myself. I'm getting really sick of these things not working, and if I've found the solution, I'd like to get it done sooner rather than later. But I simply don't know how these things work; I'm a doctor, not a computer programmer.