USB WIFI DONGLE - Weird behaviour

Hi,

Recently I've been having an issue with my WiFi adapter.
The one in question is a Netgear WNA3100 and I'm running Windows 7.

The issue is that from time to time it stops working. Now here's where it gets weird, when I click on the WiFi icon on the taskbar, all other connections it used to get (like neighbours internet and such) disappears and only mine remains with the message 'No internet access'.
When this started to happen, all I needed to do was disconnect the USB dongle and slide it back in. That used to work.

Now when I disconnect the USB, windows won't recognize it was unplugged. So I pop up the Device Manager in the Control Panel, look for the WiFi adapter and right-click 'disable'. However, this freezes the Device Manager and it goes non-responsive and it still doesn't recognize it as unplugged.

The only solution to this is a hard reset, cos even when I click on restart, the computer takes ages to shut down, eventually resulting in a BSOD.

This seems to happen when I'm downloading stuff, watching a film or just youtube or when playing online games. (especially more when I'm downloading).

What can it be? Is it just the WiFi dongle just stopped working, or is this windows related?