Alfa 500mw USB adapter

I just took delivery of this last week and have been trying ever since to get it to work with no luck. The product has no online support, either from the manufacturer (Taiwan) or the peope who import and sell it on eBay. I'm hoping someone here might have some experience with either the adapter or the WLAN utility that manages and configures it...or any pointers to help me.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop running Vista Home Basic (32-bit) with no networking problems when using two other wireless adapters, other than weak signal.

The Alfa advertising and packaging both say the adapter is Vista compatible. However, the install CD contains only a Vista driver for the adapter but not the wireless LAN utility, so there is no way to configure it. It will only install on an OS running XP or older, or Linux.

I try Windows Zero Configuration (WZC) utility to connect to APs broadcasting in the -64 to -92 dBi range and the adapter gets no response, there is no "handshake" at all.. But both of my other adapters will connect to these same APs with varying degrees of throughput, depending on conditions.

I found a WLAN utility called WiFi Hopper that also works fine with my two other wireless adapters but not the Alfa. I haven't been able to download the Realtek RTL8187 suite of drivers because the site is always down when I can get a decent connection...like now. Realtek has a number of drivers and utilities updated since the ones on my install disk, so I don't know if there is a fix for the Vista incompatibility issue or I got ripped off for being dumb enough to buy a deceptively advertised and/or faulty product.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of this adapter? Thanks in advance for any help.