Bad IP or Network?

The other day I was trying to set up a wireless printer by using a USB drive. As soon as I plugged the USB into my laptop, I lost my wireless connection. Somehow it looks like a bad IP address is now being used for my laptop and I can no longer connect wirelessly to the internet. Wired is no problem but my router and laptop and modem are no longer speaking wirelessly. I'm pretty certain the problem is with the IP stuff in my home network configuration but I cannot find a way to either edit or delete the information that is in it. I cannot even find a file or area where my home information is listed. When I try to connect, I get the limited or no connectivity message after it stops trying to renew the IP address. I have rebooted the modem, left the router unplugged and done all of the stuff that seems to resolve some problems. If I leave the TCP/IP on automatic the bad IP comes in and I cannot connect. If I use the "Always use" address it looks like it connects wirelessly but I still can't do anything wirelessly. Anyway, I thought the easiest thing to do would be to delete the network I was using and then reconstruct it but it looks like you can't do that. I tried system restore but that didn't change anything. The what looks to be bad IP keeps showing up when I do the ipconfig thing. Does anybody have any ideas about what to do next? This seems like it should be an easy problem to fix but I'm not seeing it. The router is a NETGEAR VPN824 v2, Bellsouth is the provider, I'm running XP home.

 

Excuse me. It was a thumb drive to plug into a usb port of the computer while running "wireless network setup wizard." once the information from the wizard is written onto the drive then you plug it into the usb port of the printer and all the stuff necessary for running wirelessly is presumably transferred to the printer. so, when I plugged the thumb drive into the laptop usb port and ran the network wizard so that i could add the printer to my existing and working network, that's when things went screwy. I most likely did not do the wizard stuff correctly and got things ******* up. Now I'm looking for a way to get back.

 

What is the printer?

 

HP deskjet 6988. After going through the described stuff above, I started to get an IP address of 169.254.204.249 when/where the tcp/ip under network connection goes to automatically obtain an ip address. I believe the router (it is a netgear wpn824 v2) ip address should be placed there - something like 192.168.0.1 - so i switched to "use the following address" and entered 192.168.0.1, but the wireless connection still does not work. I am also missing the dns and gateway numbers. I am trying to get those from Netgear as well as the correct router ip address. I think the problem lies in the internet connection area but am not sure what number goes where. I went in to system restore in safe mode earlier today to see if that would clean things up but it did not. I'm on the fringe of my abilities with this so excuse me if I don't have things exactly right. I'm trying to be as specific as possible. When I run setup for my router, the internet light does not come on so maybe the 192.168.0.1 ip address is not right for this router. On the router login page I enter the information requested but when the internet test comes up it fails. I can successfully ping 192.168.0.1 when I have a cable running from the modem to the router and then from the router to the ethernet connection to my laptop but I cannot connect wirelessly. Any insight you have is appreciated.