Acer :: 5315 W/ Atheros Wifi

I've got an Acer Aspire 5315 which is paying up merry hell. We 'backgraded' to WinXP Pro because Vista sucks donkey balls.

According to hardware scans the machine has got an Atheros AR5007EG wifi module (though on the back of the shell it says it'a an Atheros AR5BXB63 which means it's an AR5006 not 5007 - not sure what diff that would make).

The issue is this: if I connect to my home wifi router, the acer stays connected for three minutes (sometimes 3 minutes and 5 seconds), then TCPIP (event 4201) appears in the Event Viewer-> indicating that the device has connected again. It does this twice (three minutes between events), and on the third event throws an event 4202 indicating that the card has disconnected. Wireless light is flickering constantly.

I have scanned for malware, and driver scans tell me that the firmware for the Atheros card is up to date.

Has anybody else had a similar problem? My next adventure will be to remove the wifi module completely and use a USB dongle for wifi access.

I'm going to try a new AR5BXB63 driver that I just downloaded from a third source, but I don't hold out much hope, frankly.

One more thing - when the Acer cuhcks a spazz, it drags down the whole wifi network is I use our 2Wire 2701HGV-W, but doesn't if I use an old SpeedStream 4200 modem and dLink DI524-UP wifi router. How's that for odd?