Sounds like life is treating you well. Quite the empire, er, network you have.
I'm going from the basement of a 2 story to the upper floor, same side of the house, opposite corners.
I did manage to fix said problem for now. Went into device manager for the PCI card and there is a SSID setting. Changed that to my SSID name and all is well. Default was linksys. Someone in the neighborhood has the default running.
Strange thing is still that the laptop won't work if I change the channel.
Amazing to see how many wireless networks there are right here.
Anyway, I may just upgrade the router in the future. Any input on USB connections versus cards for adapters?