A Word of Advice - Windows 7 vagaries
If you're driven to distraction by Windows 7 pecadillos that seem to defy resolution, my advice would be to double-check that you have the latest chipset and bios update for your machine.
I suspect that Windows 7 updates are introducing faults that can only be resolved by updating the bios..... which isn't promulgated with the same openness that Windows updates are.
This has been my experience over a few recent issues anyway. Latest was the case of the disengaging mouse (Dell laptop Vostro 3500).