Laptop can't communicate with Airport

This problem has surfaced for me too now. I guessed it had to do with the recent update on airport utility, but no program can use bonjour to find the airport extreme or the two airport express I have. Basically the computer is unaware of any airports in the network. I've tried the obvious stuff like reinstalling, airport utility, downgrading airport utility, turning off the firewall, and even reinstalling bonjour.
I only have this problem on a lenovo laptop running windows XP though. My macbook pro has no problems of this kind.
Tried it on a virtual-pc running windows 7 and it works, but then again I haven't upgraded any airport utilities there...

I have verified that the update of airport utilities didn't break my windows 7-installation at least.
But the issue remains.

I actually downgraded it and that didn't work...
Back to 4.4.2 or whatever version was before the old one in the support-downloads-section.
So unless the upgrade does som permanent damage it's actually not the culprit here...

I can't break the setup on my windows 7-machine, and the mac is from experience quite breakage-free so it's hard to duplicate the steps that started this. Actually looks like bonjour is completely non-working on that machine, in regards to the airports at least. Maybe I should try to see if I can connect to other bonjour-devices...just have to "make" one.

Actually I'm stumped for now.

I had the same problem that occurred at almost the exact same time but have resolved it now. I have an Airport Extreme and 4 Airport Expresses. One day last week they just stopped communicating with the Airport Utility (or vice versa).

I tried everything; reloading the Utility, reverting to an older version, reloading older firmware on the Extreme, resetting my devices, checking firewall setting and everything else I could imagine in Windows XP.

Here is what I did. Hopefully it will work for you. Deinstall both the Airport Utility AND Bonjour programs -(Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs). Go to http://support.apple.com/kb/DL955 and download the current version of the Airport Utility and install it. It will also install Bonjour during this process if it is not currently installed.

Bonjour is what automatically detects the devices. Something caused Bonjour not to communicate with the Airport Utility. I don't know exactly what the problem was or how it was caused, but reinstalling them together corrected my issues. If anyone has any thoughts on what might have caused it, I would be very interested.

Thanks.

You're a lifesaver 😉

Your method worked perfectly. I had tried reinstalling everything but not in the right order it seems.
The bonjour-version on the bonjour-page is broken or gets broken by airport utility. Oh well.
It works, and my wife is happy again.

Next time I'll probably just buy another mac...

You got to be crapping me. I had a windows xp that was working fine wired to a TC, all of a sudden the airport didn't see it.

I LOVE YOU MZC500!!!!! Worked like a charm. You know how many hours I spent on this...

I am having a similar problem as in this thread. I have one HP laptop that connects to the extreme, but not out to the Internet with security enabled, if security is disabled it works fine. Others on the system work fine with security enabled. I have disabled firewalls, and I know this is probably a stupid question but I want to try the latest suggestion on uninstalling and reinstalling the utility. Do I need to have the airport utility installed on each laptop that I want to connect via the extreme or just the computer I am using to configure the device.

The machine that is having problems is not the machine used to configure.

Thanks

How wonderful for you guys... It just doesn't work for me 😟

I have the exact same problem - suddenly a couple of months ago my iTunes couldn't find my Airport Express (external speakers). And as for you - the Airport Utility can't find it by scan either but I can connect to it by "Configure other" directly on the IP address.

I've tried uninstalling Airport Utility and Bonjour, and then reinstalling Airport Utility 5.5.1 but I get the same result.

Did you do something else??? By the way just to be absolutely sure: Windows guys - you did install the Airport Utility 5.5.1 for Windows right (not for Mac as the link points to)?

Please, any other ideas? I'm getting crazy not being able to play my music...

/Mette

Also see http://superuser.com/questions/129473/airport-express-discoverability for relevant causes and potential solutions.

I've been crying, tearing my hair out and hitting my PC really hard a lot lately!
I called Apple support but they had no idea and said they don't really support playing music from a Windows PC using Airport Express and Airtunes!!!

But thanks to the brilliant solution from mzc500 I finally got things working!

I've had this problem for some time. I've tried in two different wireless networks, with two different Vista PC's and I just couldn't make it work.
It worked before but suddenly stopped.

So I uninstalled the Airport Utility and iTunes and then installed the Airport Utility again it worked like a charm!!!

Then I installed iTunes 9.1.1... it stopped working...

So my conclusion is this:
The problem is the newer version of iTunes on my Vista PC.
It has a newer version of Bonjour which basically messes everything up.

When I had an older iTunes installed everything worked fine.

What I have yet to try is this:
* Install the Airport Utility
* Make a copy the C:\Program Files\Bonjour directory that comes with it
* Install iTunes 9.1.1
* Rename/move the new Bonjour files that comes with iTunes and replace them with the ones from the Airport Utility (might wanna to stop the Bonjour service first)

Or 1:
Instead of copying/replacing Bonjour maybe it's possible to install the Airport Utility after iTunes, but I don't know what happens, if Bonjour from iTunes is overwritten.

Or 2:
Maybe it's also possible to install iTunes, use Add/Remove programs from the Control Panel and remove Bonjour from there and then install the Airport Utility. Maybe this installs a working Bonjour.

Right now I skipped iTunes and use Airfoil and Spotify instead - marvellous!
Sometime soon I'm gonna want to update my iPod though...

Once again, big thanks mzc500!!!!

Message was edited by: himmelskadagar

I love Apple. But when you buy a product like the Airport Express and it is sold as working with Microsoft Windows then it should work! I'm very disappointed that Apple doesn't have a fix for this issue with there built in software update. It would seem so me after Windows 7 being out for over a year that they would have fixed this by no so they obviously don't give a ****! What a shame!!!

I have windows 7 running on a macbookpro. The airport utility (and iTunes) couldn't see the aiprot express I tried:

- Calling apple tech support (they couldn't figure it out)
- turning off wifi security
- uninstalling bonjour and then installing the latest version of airport utility (5.5.1)
I probably tired some other things that I can't remember.

The thing that finally worked for me was turning off "multicast streams" on my dlink dir-825.

Hal