I tell you, it never rains but it pours.
After dinner my son asks if he can play his Lego Avengers game. I say sure, for one hour. He comes back down stairs a minute later telling me "my internet icon is gone".
I go up and look and sure enough the little internet wifi icon usually on the taskbar is gone. I check his card, it checks out fine. I notice an alert and it's about the firewall being turned off. I ask him if he's messed with anything and he says no. I try to turn it back on an it simply will not.
As a final test I take the usb wifi down to the main floor, plug it in to this laptop, disable the onboard and it works just fine.
Gotta admit, I'm stumped. Guess I'll do a system restore on it this morning after he wakes up and see what happens.