Network Driver Deletes on Reboot

Studio 1737 Laptop, Vista 64-bit, Dell 1510 Wireless N mini-PCI

(Sorry, for the long post, just wanted to give details.)

So I bought a new laptop for my wife at Best Buy. It's pretty awesome except for this one problem. I've had it for almost two weeks, and on 5 separate occasions, either after booting up for awaking from sleep, the wireless network driver just goes missing. I get the "New Hardware Detected" window. This has only happened in the mornings, so I assume it's after a prolonged period of inactivity. But shutting down and booting up a few minutes later does not  reproduce the error.

One thing I did when I first got it was reinstall Vista64 from the recovery disc in order to remove the unneeded 10 gig recovery partition (since it came with a disc and recovery software). I don't know if the problem happened before doing this, because it was the first thing I did with it.

When the problem happens, if I go to Device Manager I see it says Other Device (!) with an exclamation. If I uninstall that and click detect changes it turns into Network Controller (?). If I try to run Setup.exe from the driver download, it says "No compatible hardware found. Setup will not continue."

In order to fix it, I have to boot into safe mode, open Device Manager, uninstall a strange line that looks like this (xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx). Reboot into safe mode, install the driver not from the Setup.exe, but by selecting the INF in the new hardware wizard. If I try to install the driver in normal mode, the hardware wizard says, "Windows encountered an error installing this device."

I tried the previous drivers, and the drivers before those and it's happened on each one of them.

I ran the hardware diagnostics from the Dell boot disc, and all PCI devices checked out okay.

When the computer is booting up, I can tell if it's going to work because the WiFi light turns on. If it stays dark the device driver will be lost. One last thing, every time I get it to work it adds an incriment to the device name in Device Manager.

• Dell 1510 Wireless N mini-PCI #2
• Dell 1510 Wireless N mini-PCI #3
• Dell 1510 Wireless N mini-PCI #4

When the Wireless card is operational it works really well, and I can transfter files very quickly accross the network.

Thanks in advance for any insight.