Unable to keep wireless connection on two USB wireless cards

I have an older machine, 1Ghz Athlon, with 2 GB of ram on it.
This is a secondary machine, not meant to have any beautiful graphics or anything on it, just to run a few small services.

I installed XP and Vista on it (not at the same time) and am encountering the same issue on each OS - I can't maintain a wireless connection using a USB wireless card.

I've tried 2 of them that I have - a Zyxel b/g card and a iBlitzz b card.

The connection shows that it's there, but it's like the cards have gone to sleep.

I've turned off all power management to USB, but the problem still keeps happening.

The link lights on the devices show they are connected - but nothing happens when I try to access the network.

I am thinking that the issue would be that the PC has only 2 USB 1.0 ports, and I am using one of those for a USB mouse. Perhaps the other port doesn't have enough juice to maintain good connectivity?

The adapters aren't the problem. I can hook them up to my main PC and have no issues, with the receiver portion sitting in literally the same place.

The longest I can keep a connection is maybe an hour.

Any ideas?

I had the same problems with my Kids's PC, what I had to do was uninstall the Windows Zero Manager and use the software from the Manufacturer (in my case Linksys), this was the only way for me to make them work.

I only use XP though.

I'll give that a shot - are you basically disabling the service?

I did the disable of the zero wireless configuration service - looks like that may have done the trick in XP!

Upgrading the box to Vista now to see if it works there too!