Latitude E6500 wireless connection issues

This machine has the Intel 5100 wireless card in it and near as I can tell the drivers are updated save for one driver on the dell site that says it's 'optional'.

From day one this machine has been very slow to find and connect to our home wireless internet (verizon fios, via the verizon router).

Now the machine will connect to our internet and show full bars, strong signal strength, and will work for awhile but eventually, after an hour or so, it will not allow access to Any websites (still connected to the wireless, strong signal strength).

Disconnecting the internet connection through dell connection manager and then reconnecting sometimes re-establishes the abiltiy to access websites, but more often than not this does not resolve the problem. Same thing with using 'repair' via windows, it says it cannot repair the issue.

The only way to re-establish the ability to access websites is to shut the machine down completely and re-start and wait for it to find the signal. As you can imagine, this is very frustrating. My wife uses her laptop right next to me and has no trouble like this. Further, I have been in other wireless areas and the my machine will do the same thing - drop the ability to access websites but still have a strong wireless signal connection.

My machine is running xp pro.

Is there somewhere else I should look for drivers besides the dell site? I cannot for the life of me get the one optional driver for the 5100 to download to my machine. Every-time I click download it downloads the dell download manager but not the actual driver file? When I open download manager it says I need to select files to download?

I was hoping the dell driver site would analyze my machine specifically and tell me what drivers (specifically) needed updating but it doesn't seem to do that, just lists a bunch of drivers based on my service tag, but not specific to the options my machine happens to have.

Is there another wireless card I can put in this machine to fix this problem? Really frustrated with this issue that has been going on far too long.

Thanks

Whoops, probably was supposed to put this under the Latitude section.