My internet is coming in over a wireless router. Only my laptop (XP home) has a wireless card. I want my linux machine to be able to connect to the internet through the laptop. I have a hub connecting my laptop and my desktop and the internet sharing enable on the wireless connection.

The problem is that something seem to work on the linux machine and some don't. I can search on google, but I can't get to Yahoo's webpage (it just sit there and tries to load it). The AIM part of GAIM can connect, but the MSN part can't. The Linux AIM client can connect, but the Yahoo Linux client can not.

Does anyone have any ideas about what I might be doing wrong and what a fix might be?

That's a pretty confusing network topology from your description. If I'm reading that right, your network is set up like this?

Most wireless routers are set up to assign an IP from a non-routable block. They do NAT on any packets headed to the outside world. Check the wireless interface on your XP machine. It should be something along the lines of either 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or (more rarely) 172.16.x.x. If it's one of those, you're already behind one layer of NAT.

Something to check is whether or not your XP network bridging is acting like a regular bridge or a NAT-ing router. I've run into quite a few situations where going through two layers of NAT caused problems with a lot of programs. Make sure the addresses that your desktop and Linux box are recieving are coming from the wireless router's DHCP server and not from the XP box.

The windows internet connection sharing is horrible. I would not use it on a permanent basis. It goes really slow and has all sorts of issues.

i see no reason why this shouldnt work just fine

DONT use connection bridging in windows, it isnt what you want. and DO let the xp machine give the linux box an IP, you wont be able to get one from the router since windows ICS does NAT also.

oh, and the wireless and wired networks should probably be on different subnets if they arent already