I had exactly the same problem as you guys! It seems that I solved the problem. In my case the problem started after I upgraded to Leopard. I did the standard upgrade from the installation disk. The performance of Airport was terrible. Before the upgrade it was stumbling fast.
I tried everything, but nothing really helped or was only of temporary kind. So I decided to back up my important file and do a clean install (with format) for all my Apple computers. Of course this was a huge job, but I got crazy with the drop-outs. It seems that this worked, the connection seemed to be even faster.
Then all of a sudden it started again!!! Then I remembered it was not only my upgrade to Leopard that was changed in my configuration. I also added a left-over AirPort Expressed based on ‘n’ to my network. Thought it was convenient to have Internet in the garden. So I took out my only network device based on ‘n’ and everything ran smoothly.
“Now with blazing 802.11n”, well it blazed away my bandwith, so I will put it on eBay and try to exchange it for 802.11b, and 802.11g. Apple claims “Interoperable with Wi-Fi Certified 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g”, but don’t count on that. Only when ALL devices are “n” based.
I hope this helped you guys.

It’s “AirPort Extreme Update 2008-004″ (1.0).”

From the site: “This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers running Mac OS 10.5.5.”

Note: I don’t have Airport Extreme. I have an old Airport Express and a Linksys. But it still fixed the problem.

Good luck!

Apple just released an Airport update that I installed just now, and page loads are MUCH, MUCH faster.

Give it a download and let us all know if you’re fixed too. (And re: the Real Player theory, it didn’t work for me.)

Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end. And thanks for all your input along the way

I wonder whether this is actually two different sets of problems. Does the scanning message only appear once one clicks on the airport symbol? Or does it scan all the time as the wildly fluctuating download speeds during my patch downloads might suggest?

Let’s see what Apple is going to come up with - I should try a few more applications like Skype that need a permanent connection and monitor the situation.

Real Player might have come pre-loaded on your computer, have you disabled the downloader? De-activating this seemed to have helped out a lot of people.

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I put a new firmware into my Linksys router, I run 10.5.5, have no security stuff running. It’s super frustrating.

I have no software on the machine but what came with it and World of WarCraft, have to admit it. Using the “join other network” method did nothing for me, I see the constant scan again.

This is my first Mac and I am clearly not impressed.

I got rid of the real player downloader, as suggested above but didn’t seem to fix the problem. I happened to click on the airport icon and then join other network selecting my own. This did the trick. I read somewhere else, and I lost the link now, that the “join other network” will clear the cache (not sure what it all means), so I think real player was the problem…or maybe creating a conflict between our computers. Who knows.

Anyway, thanks for everyone’s help, very much appreciated.

Steve

However… the PING solution appears to “fix” it.. not sure how much the constant ping traffic effects things.

here is the script I am using…

activate application “Terminal”
tell application “Terminal”
do script “ping 192.168.1.67″
set miniaturized of windows to true
end tell

change the 192.blahblahblah to whatever you router ip is. found that in the network control panel.

“Save as” application & you have a steady connection.

Insane, but true.

Jeff