Network Connections Vanish After Windows Auto-Update

To start out my specs of the networking hardware I'm having issues with are as follows
Board: Asrock 4coredual VSTA (I think the onboard LAN is a VIA PHY VT6103... or at least thats what google told me)
CPU: E6600
2GB RAM


I was working on some music theory homework two nights ago and inevitably windows update had been bothering me every five minutes with the whole "to finish updating your computer must restart, restart now? or shall we bother you again in 5 minutes?" Seeing as it was late and I just wanted to go to bed I just kept hitting restart again in five minutes until I finished. I let the thing restart and I went to bed and was asleep for nearly 30 minutes when I was woken up by the thing ringing with the "shut down chime" or whatever you'd like to call it. I noted that it was strange seeing as I've had no troubles with my computer since the last time I visited MajorGeeks to read up on your guides to clearing out some malware my girlfriend had picked up trying to watch television shows for free on a series of chinese websites... but i'm straying off topic.

Yesterday morning I woke up, remembered the strangely long gap between me letting it restart and being woken up by it FINALLY shutting down and decided to flip my monitor on and make sure everything was fine. I tried to get on the internet only to find it wasn't working. I unplugged my router, my cable modem, and the network cables connecting everything and plugged them all back in to no avail. So I tried getting on the internet with my laptop and was surprised to see my homepage load right up.

Next I checked my Network Connections only to be BAFFLED when I saw that my LAN/Ethernet hardware connection had completely disappeared from the list. I groaned and right clicked on the disabled wireless network card which was still listed and attempted to enable it... only to see the damn icon vanish right in front of me.

So I got into the device manager only to see every single item listed under network adapters displaying the little yellow and black exclamation symbol. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers from the disks available only to end up being told that the drivers i'd just reinstalled from the disks were unable to load because either they are either corrupted or missing.

At this point I've gotten here and have tried everything up until the suggestions microsoft makes here
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826#Method1
and I've gone through all of the methods except for the ones involving editing my registry. If you think that's what I'm going to have to do then I just wanted to make sure I asked some people on a forum who know what they are doing before I start messing around in there.

Oh and I tried looking at my recently installed windows updates in the add/remove programs manager and didn't see anything being installed since March 11th before I left for Seattle last week for spring break. Sorry for the long post, just trying to get as much information as possible so we don't end up going in circles. Thanks!