I bought a TrendNET draft N wireless card and a Netgear draft N router, both of which claim capability of speed up to 300 mbps when working with other draft N devices.

Right now it's only operating at 802.11g and the wireless utility that came with the TrendNET card identifies the Netgear as a g device, but it's not. In the Netgear's admin tools it says network type is "802.11b/g/ NEXT 20/40 mhz" soo.... it SHOULD be enabled to work on draft N. I'm hoping for a reason other than "one's Netgear and one's TrendNET" but if that is honestly a possibility, I want to hear it. The reason I got different brands was the Netgear wireless card had terrible reviews and the TrendNET router was brand new and had not been reviewed at all.

Has anyone here used Draft N stuff yet, and what do you think the problem is?

Draft N stuff is bad news. It's draft because it hasn't been approved/sanctioned by the organizations that do that. So, companies release what they think it's going to be and you get conflicts since there's no standard. That's probably why it's not working.

technically its a standard just that may be changed, the IEEE committee that oversees it just has not finalized the document.

Oh well... maybe ONE day it will be n