Time Capsule not recognizing Airport Express/Extreme

Question

Time Capsule is set up and operating as desired, so the next step is to extend the range of the network by adding an Airport Extreme (that the Time Capsule is replacing as the main base station) and two Airport Expresses, one for wireless printing and one to extend the range of the network. In the previous network, the Airport Extreme was a main WDS and the two expresses were remotes/relays (I forget which). I'd like to recreate this using the Time Capsule as the main and the Extreme and the Expresses as the remotes/relays
Trouble is, Airport utility does not recognize any of these devices except the Time Capsule. All of the three older devices have be factory-reset, but they don't show up. However, if I turn off Time Capsule, they show up. Turn Time Capsule back on, however, and the other devices disappear.
Anyone have any ideas what is going on?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. I wanted to set up three devices: Time Capsule as the main "n-only" network, an Airport Extreme wired by Ethernet to the TC to create a second, "n/b/g" network," and an Airport Express for Airtunes.
WOW WAS THIS A HEADACHE. It took hours -- but I did solve it. See below.
First a brief list of the problems, some of of which were weird. First of all, Airport Utility was constantly not seeing my three devices. Worse than that, it repeatedly confused the three devices in ways that suggest the Airport Utility has bugs in it when it's looking at multiple devices at once. (For instance, while configuring Airport Express, Airport Utility mistakenly applied my AE settings to the TC (yikes!). It tried to rename my TC as an Express, and locked me in a weird loop where it repeatedly told me that AirTunes settings aren't applicable to a TC, but didn't offer a way to fix the wrong setting. I had similar "stuck in an exitless room" problems with all three devices, again and again and again. For hours and hours.)
In my case the solution was:
(1) Do a hard reset of all three devices and disconnect them from power.
(2) Set up each one separately, one at a time. I started with TC since it's the one getting connected to the cable modem.
(3) After TC set up and running properly, I quit all the way out of Airport Utility. NOTE: This proved to be surprisingly important.
(4) Then I plugged in the Airport Extreme, relaunched Airport Utility and proceed to set up the Airport Extreme.
(5) Once the Extreme was running like I wanted, I again quit all the way out of Airport Utility.
(6) Lastly, I plugged in the Airport Express, restarted Airport Utility, and set up Airtunes.
Success!
Lessons: Quitting out of Airport Utility between each discrete setup was very, very important in my case.
It took me hours to figure it out. Hope it helps you.