When Paula and I were trying to get logged into Courtyard's Internet connection on Saturday we couldn't get connected, the browser just spun it's wheels then gave us a "page cannot be displayed" message. The behavior was the same on both my laptop and Paula's.
The typical experience signing onto a commercial network is turn on your computer, open a web browser, request a page and you are magically redirected to a sign-in/sign-up page. The redirect works in some cases (the Westin most recently) and not in others (Marriott). For some reason some implementations work with Vista and some don't. I asked the hotel tech support to log me on from their end but then played with Paula's computer to try to get hers logged in.
The solution ended up being fairly simple, I turned off protected mode in IE, logged into the hotel Internet, then turned protected mode back on again.
I suppose if you're stuck in a hotel right now unable to log onto the hotel network you can't read this. Ah, the irony.