Connecting With Netgear WNA1100?

I've been using a second-hand PC for the past year. It has had persistent issues connecting to my WiFi. Other computers in the house connect without difficulty.At first I thought the dongle was responsible, so I replaced it with a more expensive one -- Netgear WNA1100. Symptoms vary, but it typically disconnects without warning, sometimes followed by announcing that the USB device is not recognised. Sometimes this can be solved by removing the dongle and inserting it in a different port, though the port itself does not seem to matter. At other times, I've had to uninstall and reinstall the driver software. Exasperating, obviously.

It is crashing my machine.Last week my hard disk died (or so the man in the computer shop told me). Because I only need this machine for my PhD work, I chose to replace the hard disk with one that was left over from an upgrade (cheaper and theoretically adequate -- I have a 12-month warranty for it). All the other hardware was checked before leaving the shop, XP reinstalled etc.Yesterday I got the computer back and started reinstalling various software. But the wifi stopped working, so I reinstalled again, and during the process my machine 'stopped' -- this was a blue-screen event and the next restart failed.the machine started again today, and connected to my network. But then the machine crashed again.

So far I have:

-- run an antivirus check (nothing)

-- updated the driver (once I got online)

-- run a disc check (using the 'Automatically fix file system errors' on C:/ drive, this involved a restart)

-- began running a full system check ('Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors') but the last crash happened during phase 4

-- the Microsoft error reports have produced nothing

So I'm at a loss. There seems to be no point reinstalling any more software till this is sorted.[Obviously I will be taking it back to the shop if I can't resolve myself since there's also a new issue with the system audio.]Here's data sent with the error report from the first crash:

BCCode : 1000008e BCP1 : C0000005 BCP2 : B7E0F28A BCP3 : B2FDCA60
BCP4 : 00000000 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 3_0 Product : 256_1

And here's my network info:

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : user-03c83a7cb4
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown

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