Your assumption is correct. The situation is that we have one location that is connected to our LAN via 802.11g wireless bridge link. This location is a small office and the users here require wireless (AP) access locally as well. There are also other people (non-office users) nearby who require wireless access, and we want to somehow filter them from accessing the AP in the small office because with many users they could easliy saturate the wireless bridge link which we're trying to avoid. If we can filter them from the AP in the office they will instead associate to other nearby APs that are directly connected to the LAN.

Aside from using a separate SSID on the AP in the small office, is there any other method by which we can have the people in the office only to use their local AP?

Use two AP's. Leave the current set up as it is so every one who has to be on the first network connected directly to the LAN.

Use a new AP with a different ssid for the small office for the people going across the bridge link. You will have to do some testing as to how low you can turn the power, where / what kind of antenna and physical location will give you a cell that is functional and not interfering with your existing network.

The only other thing I can think of is on Cisco clients there is a setiing to pick which AP you want to associate to first by typing in the MAC address.

But nothing will be as clean, easy, with no additional overhead, then the separate ssid.

In doing other research I agree that this is the only method by which to accomplish this.

Thanks for the information.