Hello All
Phew, after 48 hours of scanning forums and taking everyone's advice, our Wii U is now connected to the internet, has downloaded the update and is now updating the system with it...so hopefully we will be up and running very soon.
This is the advice I followed, which is the same as given above - the key was to MANUALLY enter the SSID as well as all the other info, rather than accept the automatically detected connection!
Firstly you need to enter the details manually so:
ssid: virginmediaxxxxxxx (xx = the numbers after your ssid)
secruity: Now change this to "WPA-PSK[AES]" and type your password. The others didnt work for me and WEP seems disabled. Make sures its changed to AES on your router too.
IP address: 192.168.0.xx - xx can be whatever you want really, I was using 35
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.0.1
Now the DNS settings can be a number of things but we'll just use googles:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
Leave the proxy blank and dont change the MTU
It worked for me, and good luck to everyone else - thank you guys for all your support
Now I'm off to play Wii U with my son - yeah!
Karen