what's the floor made out of that the signals passing through? if it's timber then it should be sweet. if its concrete then it's gonna have a hard time. Also.. in my experience.. i've had a lot of hassles with w/l usb dongles.. a are nowhere near as good as a proper pci card, as the antennas are usually inbuilt and cruddy. Actually.. i've still got 2(linksys & netgear) usb w/l dongles just sitting in a junk box somewhere at home because i wasn't happy with them. It also could be if you're plugging one of the usb dongles into a USB 1.1 port it'll only work to B(11mbit), whereas on the new machine it'll work with USB 2.0(54mbit), so even though there shouldn't be there may be an issue there. But yeah.. my suggestion is go with a wl adsl router.. the netgear dg834g is probably the way to go. never heard a complaint about it.. plus netgear support's supposed to be awesome.. so i guess it's worth the premium over say something like the smc which is about $130. but yeah.. well worth going for a wl router.. plus u get hardware firewall
which is pretty much essential these days with all the crap that goes through the net. My pc's at home are behind 2 hardware firewalls, cause i hate software firewalls.
el