All I did was get into the Audrey Preferences and choose Network. There, I entered my static IP and other pertinent information and it worked OK. But then, I'm using a wireless bridge to connect to, then the wireless bridge connectes to my wireless router - but I would expect the concept is the same as you're trying to accomplish.
How far can you ping from Audrey? Can you ping your wireless router? I would suppose not, since you don't see the Audrey connected while in the router interface.
You don't have the router set up for WEP or WPA, do you? You don't have MAC address filtering set up on the router, do you? Or if you do, you've added the MAC address of your 3Com USB dongle..
I'd think that DHCP would be the way to go for ease of use, and if that fails, try static IP (don't forget, your IP/Subnet address must be on the same network as your LAN network on the router
