Last ditch effort in getting my wifi adapter to work in vista(help me.... please!!!)Cliffnotes added

Kay, i got a new machine with Vista home premium... Its an HP, so naturally its loaded to the BRIM with bloat ware. I'm not kidding, I spent a solid 2 hours trying to remove it as best i could(uninstall and remove program files from C:\programs) there were atleast 20 programs, ranging from the expected offenders like Norton 360, to the specific HP home-grown type(HP games? WTF... why wouldnt you ask me to opt in on having that installed?)
Anyway, i chopped it down to a reasonable amount of programs, and while its still not as fast and streamlined as i like(Specs are Quad core 6600, 2 gigs of ram, Home premium, 7350le... and the start up time is over 2 minutes. My crappy XP laptop can load in under 1 minute) its about as good as i can get it.

Heres where i run into my problem though
I have to gain access to the internet from a wireless router. House is to old and sealed off(100 years old and 3 stories high. I look at the walls the wrong way and they crack) to run cat5 wire. The only wifi access card i have, works WONDERFULLY if I use the XP drivers, until i want to shut down... As Vista is shutting down, i get this wonderfully unexpected screen.
( Its literally been 5 years since i last saw this)
This reboots my system. So the only way i can turn off the thing, is shut down, get the crash screen, watch the thing reboot, wait for the HP splash screen to load, and press the power button before it starts to load vista(this cant be good, having the hard drive spin up, and down, then back up and down in the span of 5 seconds) If i try to shut down with my wifi card unplugged or even disabled though, it works fine.. no BSOD. Naturally i assume this is because of the XP driver. So i go to Dlink.com and try to find a Vista driver. I find a 'Beta' one(I doubt its any more unstable then the XP one) and try to install that on my machine... I point windows Vista to the EXACT folder its in after placing it in C:\programs\Vista Wifi(same process i used to putting the XP drivers in. I dont use the Dlink wifi app so i dont actually use the setup wizard, though one isnt even offered with the Vista patch anyway) and it says it can not find the appropriate driver. Can anyone help me out? Based off the info i have gathered, i dont have any chance of getting dlink customer support to help me out, so my only option is to go and buy a new one... and i just blew $1400 on this machine so id rather not.

The wifi adapter info is:
Dlink DWL G122 rev.A1
Heres the driver page

Cliff notes:
I'm am stupid and cant get Vista drivers from Dlink to work on my vista machine, with my DWL G122 rev.A1 wifi adapter. Can you please help me?

 

I don't know if this may help but if you look up the model number without rev.A1 you get this:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=334

it looks like they've revised this product and relased a new version keeping the same model number. It might be that the Vista/XP drivers are for this and work differently to the ones for your version.

Do you have the original installation disk available? If you do you could try installing the XP drivers from there rather than downloading the latest ones from DLinks website. Other than that I can't think of anything which may help.. Good luck!

 

Did it have the HP WLA (Wireless Lan Assistant)? Did you try to remove it? I've never had much luck with removing these type programs.

Did you attempt to let Vista install a generic driver?

If you got an Upgrade Anytime dvd with your computer I would try a clean install using this guide. Then install the regular drivers followed by installing your Dlink.

 

Yeah, i tried all those things, except the upgrade anytime one(HP did not include a disc. I'm stuck with their 'recovery partition'.)

I think i'll just bite the bullet and pick up a new card. I was hoping i would get SOME use out of this wifi adapter though, since it came bundled free with my router.