airport express won't connect to pc

I did a search and didn't find a topic like this, and google only yielded answers from before 2005, so be nice and answer my question.

I have an acer aspire revo r3610 and an hp laptop both running windows 7. I bought the acer in spring of 2010 and the hp last October. I got an airport express for my birthday which works great for my imac and ipod touch, but I can't get it to connect to my windows machines unless there is no security. I tried different combinations of signal (N 5 ghz b/g compatible etc) and nothing worked.

Upon googling my problem, I got hits from several years ago dealing with how to create a proper wep password in hex. Being new computers, they should support the other security options like wpa, right? But, when I try to connect using my windows machines, it detects the network, but won't connect. A few seconds after pressing "connect" I get "Cannot connect to network" in spite of having full bars.

I would use WPA2 and under TCP/IP settings see if you have configure IPv4 using DHCP
and it should prompt you for your wireless password.

That looks like that was the way it was set up to begin with. I tried "renewing the lease" whatever that means, and that didn't work. I also tried installing the airport utility on the laptop and it can't even find the Airport express.

RTFM didn't work either.

I tried resetting the AE to factory defaults and resetting it up and it works fine now