Computer+Me=drivelling idiot

Sometimes I believe computers have been put on this earth to test us.

I have just spend at least 5 hours yesterday and today trying to work out why
(a) my laptop wouldn't shutdown, and
(b) the wireless networking on it went erattic then stopped working altogether

After many fruitless hours trying to fix (a) I gave up and moved onto (b) where I discovered that the built-in (unused) network card had died: disabling it in the hardware profile and removing it from network properties fixed the shutdown problem. Sadly not the network problem.

I then tore my hair out trying to get wireless networking back. Installing new drivers, reinstalling old drivers, re-running setup wizards. Nada. Finally I draft a long explanation and post to Netgear support forum.

Then while waiting I decide to reinstall new drivers again. Um, it's working. Could it be that I just mistyped the passphrase for network security? Dimwit!

Oh yeah, now I find I can't send emails from a totally different machine. Was there ever a more useless error message than "connection closed by foreign host. (0)"?

Can I have a paper, pen and some stamps, please?