atheros ar5000 series

hi,

great forum with amazing info! wish had read it before i bought my notebook!

i got me a 3-month old Acer Aspire 4520 with Atheros 5007EG wireless card @ a great price!). i used to work excellent till i screwed it up by clean formatting the HD and installing xP Pro and the drivers (as i thought that'd be the easiest to clean and remove all the other prog that i'll not be using).

now ever so often the Wireless stops working! i get a plethora of issues here and tried searching the forum for answers before requesting this new thread.

issues:

1. many times when i start-up the notebook, the wireless device is not recognized.
2. sometimes, when it does get recognized, it works great for some time (with the connection light blinking on data transfer) till it freezes again with the network light coming-on steady orange instead of the blinking. it is resolved if i disable the wireless using the dedicated button, then disabling it from the network connections forlder, then enabling it back the same way. it beautifully re-connects!
3. other times, the wireless light goes off and the connection is dropped. doing the same jig above resolves.
4. and of course, like i said before, many times it just doesn't recognise the wireless device and keeps saying "No Device" on pressing the wireless dedicated button.

this is what i've done:

1. clean format of the HD with original xP Pro reloaded, original drives from the Acer CD (included).
2. updated the drivers from Acer and other websites, when originals failed to sustain.
3. changed even the driver to be installed.

can anyone please help? I've almost lost the main functionality of the notebook, that was it's wireless use. a few engineers I've shown the notebook have concluded that it's wireless is unusable and recommended an external wireless support. i don't agree as the reason for the purchase was the internal support!

pl help and enable me to use the notebook again.

thank you for your time to read the long post.

regards, G.