problems with netgear wpn311 on win2K

This is a long a miserable saga. I will shorten it to the most relevant details.

I had the netgear wireless adapter working well for about 6 months. Then it started spontateuosly dropping connections to the router. If I did an ipconfig / renew it would reconnect.

I then made the mistake of deciding to upgrade the driver. Netgear has two newer versions available. Both gave me the same result. I could ping my router but could not ping to google (or any other internet host).

I re-installed the original driver. It connects to everything perfectly. The problem is that the wireless assistant will not run. If I ever change any of my settings on the router, my connection will die.

Netgear support was totally worthless. I saw some comments about similair problems with XP on this forum. However, I am running win2K.

Has anyone had any experience with this miserable Netgear software?