broken wifi card?

[tcaruth]

last night, i grabbed a snack, got distracted and forgot to log off wow. i realized it later, but figured no big deal, i'll autolog out. it did.

this morning, i went to login again, and was stuck at the success screen after entering my pw. thought maybe it was related to the battle.net maintenance, so i opened chrome, and several of the tabs i had open yesterday would not load (including minecraftwiki, battle.net, and wowhead).
okay, so maybe this isnt because of maintenance.

flushed dns, tried again, still nothing.
reboot modem, nothing.
went into ubuntu on the same laptop, wowhead loaded okay, but still no battle.net or minecraftwiki.
tried on another computer and everything is fine.

• Dell Studio 1737
• Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-card
• windows 7x64 (upgraded from vista)

its got to be a hardware issue right?
is there a way to reset a card? i removed it from my mobo while i was at work today, just to see if that'd fix it.

does the card itself have any memory of whats going on?


[edit] i just uninstalled it with device manager, rebooted, and reinstalled using the driver for vistax64 (loaded on a flash drive from another computer, i cant get to dells support site either). still nothing.

also, i realize that this particular card isnt supported by dell for win 7, but its worked for almost 3 years no problem, and i didnt do anything between last night, and this morning.

[Nasriel]

If you can load wowhead and it got to success when logging in on wow you're online. Your isp may be acting up. Or windows may be messing up. If you are not online wow will not get to the success box

[tcaruth]

If you can load wowhead and it got to success when logging in on wow you're online. Your isp may be acting up. Or windows may be messing up. If you are not online wow will not get to the success box

not sure you read the entire post, but thanks for replying nonetheless

cant be the isp, other computers on the network are fine.
windows was ruled out when it didnt work in ubuntu either. (although maybe some setting got changed thats hardware based, not really under windows control)
and i know i'm online, but its like im only half here.

---------- Post added 2012-02-07 at 04:40 AM ----------

update

combofix found nothing bad, also quickscanned with malware bytes, nothing. mse is installed and up to date, last fully scanned yesterday