intel pro/wireless 3945ABG wireless card cannot detect any networks

hi im using windows 7 32 bit with intel pro/wireless 3945ABG wireless card on an hp dv2000 (came with vista, i upgraded it to windows 7 ultimate) and starting from today my wireless was unable to detect any networks. the wireless status looks like:

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/2549/picbk.jpg

now i tried uninstalling and reinstalling the most recent driver but it didnt help either..i also made sure my bios was up to date and even tried switching it back to factory defaults but didnt help either. on the hp dv2000 there is a wireless switch which i made sure was on, the light was also blue which means its on (red means its off) but it still wouldnt detect any wireless networks.

i found out in my services that the WLAN Autoconfig service wasnt started and it seemed important so I tried starting it but i get the error that says "Windows could not start the WLAN Autoconfig service on local computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start." I found a similar thread that also had this error here:

http://www.windowsbbs.com/networkin...tart-error-1068-dependency-service-group.html

so i changed the value of [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ndisuio] "Start" in the registry to 2 as well but that didnt help either.. im pretty sure its a software problem and my friend who checked out my computer (hes a cs graduate) also thinks nothing is wrong with the hardware and device manager is picking it up and saying it is working properly.

is there anything else i can do to try and fix this or am i stuck with either replacing it or buying a wireless usb adapter?