Windows 7 wireless network questions

[Jimbo22]

Can a wireless home network become overloaded? If so, how? What are the differences between an open wireless network ie....hospital, coffee shop or airport and a home wireless network other than the security issues. Do those public wireless networks get overloaded? If not, how is that resolved?

 

[Trouble]

Can a wireless home network become overloaded? If so, how? What are the differences between an open wireless network ie....hospital, coffee shop or airport and a home wireless network other than the security issues. Do those public wireless networks get overloaded? If not, how is that resolved?

The short answer is yes. Any network 802.3 (ethernet) or 802.11 (wireless) can become saturated either from excessive traffic, or problem devices (noise) to the point where performance degradation occurs.
Networks by default are independent collision domains and the devices attached to these networks either use Collision Detection (ethernet) or Collision Avoidance (wireless) to assist sending and receiving packets. Since your question was about wireless, when the individual collision domain becomes congested with traffic the RTS (request to send) and CTS (clear to send) packets that are used to determine whether a particular channel is idle / available for traffic show the channel as busy so packet transmission is deferred. So you can understand that if this is happening a lot then performance suffers.
As far as airports, hospitals and the like, I would assume that their public networks use some pretty robust equipment as well as multiple radios creating multiple collision domains, thereby avoiding the potential for problem congestion.