wmp300n connectivity issue

The title must seem very vague, and sorry if it is.

I have been trying to troubleshoot this all week. When I had initially installed Windows 7 everything went fine with no problems. On the get go, a generic Broadcom driver was installed on my wlan nic, considering the chipset. But this worked fine, through my wrt150n router I was getting at least 20mbps on multiple speed tests.

Also, generic drivers for sound were installed (crackle pop). I fixed that by installing the official vista drivers from creative. That worked excellent, but there were many features missing, such as the ability to switch my flexijack from line-in to mic.

I installed a driver from the creative forums by daniel_k, and every feature on my sound card magically worked. However, my internet connection completely broke. And by broke, I mean mysteriously vanished. My NIC would still see and connect to my wireless LAN, and the network and sharing center was reporting local and internet. But nothing on firefox, IE8, or even AIM/MSN.

Logically, I disabled the windows firewall first for both public and private networks. No luck. Restarted, and still no luck. I uninstalled my NOD32 antivirus, restarted, and still no luck. I reinstalled the broadcom driver for my wlan NIC, and no luck. I installed the linksys-branded drivers for my NIC, and still nothing. Keep in mind that I always get "local and internet" on my wlan network in the network and sharing center. Frustrated, I slowly uninstalled all programs associated with my sound card's driver package, restarting after each program removed. Nothing. Last, I uninstalled the sound card's driver entirely, deleting it as well.

After restarting, after all of that, I get a connection. But it is intermittent. I jumps between no connection, 32kbps, 300kbps, and 1mbps. Usually is hangs closer to 32-300kbps, and the internet literally crawls. I tried disabling IPv6, I tried disabling the QOS packet scheduler. I tried removing the wlan network from my network list and reconnecting to it. The security is 128-bit WEP open authentication. Hell, I even disabled Windows Defender. Really, nothing is working and I'm about to grudgingly use a restore point or reinstall.

Quick note, Homegroup was never enabled, and still isn't.
Also, all other computers on the network work fine. All 6 of them. 3 of them are gaming consoles that are wired, and the other 3 are wireless and work fantastic. The computer with windows 7 installed is a desktop, and again, has the linksys wmp300n.

I really don't want to give up and use a restore point. Any help? Thanks. :)

Seems like this issue may be solved. I never considered a hardware issue, as it would have seemed highly unlikely because it happened so soon after installing win7 beta.

The connection to the antenna is a bit iffy. As I run a speed test and play with the wire into the antenna, it jumps up and down. This seems to be a direct relation. I'm RMAing the NIC to linksys, and I will update everyone with the results later.

Please don't mark this as solved just yet, though.