Sorry it took so long to reply s3v3n us3r and others.
Apparently I tried replying to the emails directly instead of here on the forum. (I should really know better than to mess with email so late at night.)
In answer to your question...
I got a final response from Netgear support their answer was what I expected.
A non-committal acknowledgement of my statements that put simply means...
They don't produce 64 bit drivers of any kind.
I closed the support ticket after returning the card for a full refund.
In my closing statements I made it clear what I had done to resolve the Netgear issue and informed them that I would not purchase Netgear products again until they proved that they had produced native 64 bit drivers.
Since then I have had a few conversations with people far more knowledgeable about networking than I am and I have learned a few things.
1. Most manufacturers are not producing 64 bit drivers for most products. (Network related)
2. Most manufacturers are attempting to make 32 bit drivers work with 64 bit OSes via virtualization. (Netgear tried to use virtualization to force its 32bit XP drivers to work with Win 7.)
3. Contrary to everything I have learned, it is technically possible to use virtualization to make 32 bit drivers work in a 64-bit environment. However, this is a really, really bad idea.
4. Virtualization is not designed to work at the hardware level. It's designed to work at the OS level. (Drivers = Hardware level, Windows = OS level.)
5. Hardware virtualization means that additional instruction set(s) were produced and included in certain CPUs that facilitates virtualization software. Put simply, this means that programmers can more efficiently code virtualization software now that the hardware has code that they can exploit.
6. Driver virtualization requires the 32 bit drivers to be sent to Windows (OS level) for translation. Think of 32-bit & 64-bit as two different languages. 64-bit hardware cannot understand 32-bit hardware. So when the 32-bit hardware talks, it has to send its messages to Windows for translation. Windows does it's best to translate and then passes the message on to the 64 bit hardware. (Hardware Level to OS Level back to Hardware level.) Not only is this inefficient, it's also problematic as 64-bit Windows is not very proficient in 32-bit hardware language. So the end result is a crazy message that the 64-bit hardware does not understand. (Not a very good analogy, I know. But it's the best I could think of.)
7. Virtualized 32 bit drivers still have the same limitations on a 64 bit OS as they would have in the 32 bit OS they were natively designed for.
8. XP limits RAM to ~3.4GB. But usually XP would not run on more than 2GB. Why? Because hardware manufacturers usually limited their drivers to 2GB of addressable space. This meant that the hardware was incompatible with systems running more than 2GB. However, XP will run on a system with 4GB or more of RAM. It just won't recognize anything above it's limit ~3.4GB. Power users didn't care if XP would not recognize the full 4GB of RAM, so long as they could get the maximum amount of addressable RAM on their system. Once manufacturers understood this many started upping their driver limits. This was why some configurations worked under XP with more than 2GB of RAM.
A lot of this is not strictly about networking, but it is all relevant to the problem that I initially noted.
I should also state that the explanations I have given are very simplified.
Someone who has a better understanding of this subject can probably do a better job of explaining this.
This is the best I can do at this time; I hope this sheds some light on the issue.
