I have an inspiron 1545 and you simply press the wireless key WITHOUT the fn key. I'm sure you have tried that so I would try one of two things:
Have a look in the BIOS to see if you can enable it from there.
Failing that switch off, remove battery, hold a central heating pipe or something grounded to discharge yourself, unscrew the central panel on the bottom, remove the half PCI wireless card. Replace everything without the card, boot then shut down. Put the wireless card back in (remembering to ground again and remove battery) and boot again.