Windows Major, sudden problems with my USB wifi adapter

Hi guys,

I have a TP-LINK TL-WN722N USB wifi adapter that's worked great for me since I built my HTPC a year or so ago. I'm using it in Win7 64-bit. It was working fine last night when I sent the PC to sleep via XBMC.

Today, I woke it up like usual and straight away my wifi connection failed. I exited XBMC to check it out, and found that the wifi networks pane showed no available networks. I immediately went to the wifi adapters page in Windows, disabled and then re-enabled the adapter. Right away it connected back to my network. I thought, great, just a fluke problem! No, not so fast... after restarting XBMC, I got as far as the movies list before I got a popup telling me XBMC couldn't connect to the scraper to get movie info. Tabbed out of XBMC--yep, yellow triangle on the wifi icon... no internet access. As I sat there and watched the icon, it changed to the red x... no networks in range.

I did the disable/enable routine again and got the same result: works for a few seconds to a minute, then loses internet connection, then fails to see any networks whatsoever.

Things I have tried:
1. Uninstalled the device (and the drivers), then reinstalled with the latest drivers from the TP-LINK site. No effect/same symptoms.
2. Started in Safe Mode w/ networking. No effect/same symptoms.
3. Reset my router to factory settings. No effect/same symptoms.
4. Turned off encryption/made sure MAC filtering was off on the router. No effect/same symptoms.
5. Tried to connect via wifi tether to my LTE phone connection. No effect/same symptoms (so it's not the router/my particular network).
6. Tried the TP-LINK adapter on my laptop (with its built-in wifi disabled). Adapter performed flawlessly/didn't experience any connection drops.

Haven't tried, but am about to:
1. Booting to a Ubuntu LiveCD, seeing if the adapter works properly in Linux.

Haven't tried, am reluctant to do so:
1. Format c:, reinstall Windows.

Anyone got any bright ideas?

sometimes adapters go its happened to me they just kind of fry out.

Update: Works flawlessly in Ubuntu.

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(2012-05-10 06:10)lagledavid Wrote:  sometimes adapters go its happened to me they just kind of fry out.

Yeah, it's definitely not the adapter, though.

Seems to be some kind of problem with the way my HTPC's particular install of Windows is interfacing with it, because a) it works fine on my laptop, and b) it works fine on Ubuntu on the same system.

Did you install any updates for Windows recently? Add any new hardware or software?

No and no.

But I gave up on it at about 1am last night and decided to wipe and install XBMCbuntu. Working great so far.