1-2 bars, 2' away?

I recently set up an Airport Extreme base station for two friends who got matching 15" G4 laptops, also equipped with Airport Extreme cards. One PBook is upstairs with the base station, sitting about two feet away. The other is downstairs on a dining room table.
The one downstairs gets a consistent 2-bar signal. I figure since it's receiving through a floor and maybe one wall, that's about average.
The PBook sitting two feet away from the base station only gets 1-2 bars. I have the recollection that he had a full four bars when I set it up a month or two back.
I think the user of the upstairs PBook may have applied recent updates. His OS version now shows 10.4.1 and some things are different (printer setup utility is gone, etc). I am wondering if there might have been recent Airport updates or something else that's changed things.
Not sure if the downstairs system has updated or not.
I need to figure out what things to look for and tweak to get the upstairs machine to get a decent signal. It's 2' away from the base station, only getting 1-2 bars. I am pretty sure it had a full 4 when I set it up; if it only had 1-2 bars then I would have written this note much sooner.
They don't have a wireless phone in that room. They've got a 900MHz one downstairs in the kitchen which they don't use often and was not in use when I was just over there.
I figure it's some other unidentified interference (doubtful) or something in the latest round of updates.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance...

The fact the "Printer Setup Utility" is gone is not normal -
that utility is present on all Macs running MacOS 10.3 or
newer.
Yeah, I thought so, too. This started as a phone call to troubleshoot a printing problem, but when the user couldn't find "Utilities" under his Applications I got confused and went over. He was right, there is no Utilities folder present in his Applications. I used Print & Fax in the System Preferences to check out his printer.
So since he's only running 10.4.1 then it's probably not a software update issue.
I've heard the metal-case explanation for wireless reception before. However, the exact same model sitting one floor down in the dining room gets a consistently better signal than the device sitting 2' away. I figured case-design was a wash in this comparison.
I saw some other threads talking about connections between the antenna cable and an Airport Extreme card. Would that be something worth looking into? I haven't lifted a laptop keyboard since my clamshell iBook; is it even worth trying to check it out here?
Thanks!

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