Wireless Connections icon gone? Faulty Wi-Fi adapters?

Hello,
I recently bought a new pc so I thought I'd get the Windows7 Ultimate 64bit edition to go with it.

Problem is my old Realtek WiFi usb dongle (Realtek RTL8187) didn't seem to work and after installing various drivers to get it working and failing I decided to buy a new WiFi usb adapter from TP-Link (TP-Link TL-WN321G).
This new adapter is installed and everything seems fine in the Device Manager but I get nothing after that.
The windows utility that should pop up and let me know of any wireless networks around isn't on the system tray.
I believe the utilities installed by either the Realtek or the TP-Link WiFi cards must be blocking it.

How can I remove them altogether and go back to windows controlling my wireless networks?
And how can I ultimately fix this and get connected finally to my wireless network because
atm I have resorted to connecting this pc to my old one where it shares the internet connection via a LAN cable and it drives me crazy.

I am new to Windows 7 and any help would be greatly appreciated
Thank you!

from the search bar in 7 type: services.msc

from there you're looking for: WLAN autoconfig -- set this to "automatic" and start it.

That service is already started and is also set on automatic but still no icon on system tray.

does your system recognize that you do have something plugged into your USB device? ie: safely remove hardware icon in sys tray?

No it doesn't but it shows up in the Device Manager, under Network Adapters as RT73 USB Wireless LAN Card and it also shows up in Network Connections as Wireless Network Connection but its disabled and even if I right click and try to enable it, it doesn't do it.

Do you get any errors when trying to "enable" it? Does it show another wireless connection that is "enabled"?

No errors at all. It just stays disabled and nothing changes.
There are no other enabled connections in there.

That TP-Link WiFi adapter btw seems to work fine on my laptop where Windows7 is installed there as well.

did you install the link utility?


And... Can you screen shot the properties box of that wireless connection, please?

Sorry the TP-link doesnt have any utility, only the Realtek one.
Here's a screenshot so you can see the system tray as well.

Ok no problem, in the network connections page, right click on the "Wireless connection 10" and select "enable".

then get rid of zone alarm