My mom's PC had the same problems, and even worse, as when connection was possible, connection was very shaky and fell very often. When her old PC died, I built her a partially new one, replacing only PSU, mobo (with on-board GPU), CPU, CPU fan and RAM, I upgraded her from Win XP to Kubuntu, and I kept the old case and disks and THE OLD Wi-Fi USB key: well, with the new OS and drivers, it works perfectly, it looks like the old XP ones couldn't manage correctly the connection when there were many active connections in the neighbourhood.
So, you could boot your PC with a recent live Linux distro (so you won't have to modify anything installed before having more infos), if the connection will work well, then it's a purely SW problem, the drivers themselves or some conflict between wi-fi drivers and other drivers or other SW.
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A fart without stink is like a sky without stars.
TGS, Third Grade Shooter: brand new genre invented by Kevin Butler exclusively for Natal WiiToo Kinect. PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW!

