Completely Random Wireless Problem

Howdy, I've got a dell studio 15 with a intel wifi 5100 internal wireless card that shows no internet I've done massive registry mods so I'd prefer not to reinstall(duh). Anyway...I never shutdown or restart the computer unless I've un/installed something or modified the registry so I don't think that's a problem. I installed the first set of 11+ windows security and explorer updates when I first got my computer several months ago and haven't done any ever since. I routinely maintain my computer,etc. OK, so yesterday I was on the internet at a local wireless router and nothing has changed except I decided to shutdown, reboot, and scan for viruses because I was having problems where keys had suddenly become command keys (pressing r always opened run no matter where I was, etc) interesting... but annoying (not in a true admin user btw) so I don't think it was a virus; reason: I was having memory leak issues with IE earlier so I chalked it up to that. I restarted as I said and everything is fine except now I randomly can't detect any routers. I don't think its from any of my changes to the computer because I always shutdown afterward and it works fine.

note: this has happened once before where I disabled the default Windows WLAN sercive to install the experimental VirtualWiFi service from microsoft (aka I did it on purpose but the new service didn't work) I can't remove services as far as I know since I have premium (dumb that you can install but not uninstall in my opinion) but I did disable the new one and reenable the WLAN service so that probably isn't the problem.

I would like to avoid reinstalling drivers as I don't know where the disks are and I doubt that's the problem since I haven't updated them and device manager says they're fine...

Thanks in advance for any replies since I dont' have my own internet now...

I did nothing but wait another 15 hours and restart again and then it randomly started working, interesting thing was the wifi light was off when the switch was on. If anyone has any ideas on why this happened though I would be interested as I've passed certifications in XP and CISCO (not that that means much) and I still had no idea what was going on...It seems from what I found to be either a Intel issue or a Dell issue, but Vista makes me wonder...