Nikon Coolpix P1 & Wireless

Finally got my camera set up to talk to my laptop wirelessly - whew, what a mission! If you know what you're doing it's probably not too bad, but I know pretty much nothing about wireless.

First I had to get my pcmcia card to work with the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration, so that I could assign an SSID to my laptop. Then I had to set up the network on the camera - then I had to start all over, because I was using an infrastructure network instead of an ad-hoc network.

I've got it working now, mostly, although there are some clashes with my internet connection, which is a wi-fi connection to my wireless router in infrastructure mode. If I set that to connect manually, or I have my laptop somewhere where it can't connect to the router (which you'd think would be easy, considering the connection problems I have - but Murphy's Law has kicked in), then my camera connects and transfers the photos fine. But I don't really want to leave that connection on manual, nor do I want to have to change it to manual every time I want to transfer photos - it kinda makes it not so simple and easy as the wireless was intended to make it. The problem is that if it tries to connect to the router automatically, then it disconnects the camera connection. I thought I could just change the order of the preferred networks, but those 'move up' and 'move down' buttons are now disabled - it's as if an infrastructure connection will always take preference over an ad-hoc connection :-( In the advanced settings window, the only options are (a) Any network, access point preferred; (b) infrastructure only; or (c) ad-hoc only. What I need is (d): Any network, ad-hoc preferred. Pity that doesn't seem to exist. Is it so odd to want my camera connection to take preference over my internet connection?

Like I said, I don't really know a lot about wireless networks. So maybe I need to go do some research on this - but I don't really even know enough to understand what I read. So if anyone reading this has any ideas as to what I could do, I'd really appreciate it...

Update: just by the way, I kinda got this sorted eventually - I got my own router, and got much better access; it also meant that I could set it up in infrastructure mode, since I can set the allowed mac addresses on the routher. So now it works just fine with my laptop connected to the internet via the router, and the camera connected to the laptop via the router.