Wifly shield doesn't work unless serial device is present?

Hi, I have a problem with my project when I try and just connect using the wifly shield to the rooter.

I am using arduino uno, wifly shield connected just with pins 10-13 and power,reset,gnd And has been working fine before.

It is a 4x4 robot, and is controlled wirelessly from my laptop connected via a terminal I have created with sockets etc.

Wifly connected to rooter, laptop is connected to rooter also.

I had a ucam ttl connected to the serial pins of the arduino 0,1 and all was working fine. I have recently discarded the camera and now the wifly shield won’t connect to the rooter unless I have the usb plugged in. And of course this isn’t what I want as its a wirelessly controlled robot.

(When usb is plugged in it is the same as using serial pins 0,1 on the arduino)

(Also note that there was no code from the camera or such in my code and that it hasn’t changed at all)

So the only thing I can think of is that the wifly shield needs to have a serial device connected either to the usb or the serial ports 0,1 of the arduino in order to be able to connect to the rooter.

This sounds very weird to me, so I have been sifting through the wifly libraries and inclusions files and not found anything to do with Serial library directly.

Has anyone got any ideas? Does it need a serial device present even if it has nothing to do with the wifly shield?

Thanks for any ideas, because I have been trying to sort this out for weeks with no luck.