jj: No I didnt do a clean reinstall. The computer was running real slow, and so I did the mbam thing which identified a lot of viruses, a few trojans and this thing called green av. I deleted all those things but I guess one of those deletes got rid of the wireless network adapter.
Usually when I do a clean install, I go to the manufacturer website on a different computer, download the wireless network driver and or the ethernet driver, transfer it to the computer that had the reinstall, and once I connect that to the internet, go to devicce manager and automatically search the web for the driver for the other devices that have yellow exclamations.
But in this case the ethernet driver worked, not the wireless one (I disabled the ethernet and enabled the wireless, which could read that there was the network but it didnt connect). I uninstalled the wireless adapter, and then connected through the ethernet cable and tried to do the usual 'search the web automatically' but there was no entry for wireless adapter in device manage so I couldnt do that. Whats more I couldnt find a driver for the network controller that way either.
Theres just so many drivers i dont know which one to choose. I was contemplating doing a system restore but I thought I might get some hints from this board, so here I am