Windows 7 Sleep Damages Network Adapter?

I have an Acer Aspire 5755g running Windows 7 Home premium. It is a few months old and been working fine until the last few weeks where I have had an escalating series of problems. I have got used to closing the screen to send the machine into sleep mode. The new Windows7 sleep seems to work much better than Vista and the resume has always been very quick. Then problems suddenly started.Firstly I occasionally lost wireless connection but the machine found it again (automatically) after a while.Then, the connection dropped out permanently and diagnostics indicated a yellow flag against the Broadcom network adapter in Device manager. At first getting the machine to reset worked. Then I had to reinstall the drivers and that worked. Then disabling/reenabling the adapter was the only way. Then even that did not work.

At one point the computer froze whenever I touched the internet connection icon or the Device Manager item. Then it just froze completely whenever it came out of sleep and I had to do a hard close.At one point I could only restart in safe mode.When this happened I fiddled with all of the things I had tried before (reinstalling etc) but don't really know what worked. One time I just left it over night and in the morning it worked.The Acer help people suggest wiping the hard disk and using their recover utility to set the machine back to factory condition but this will wipe out all of my data and programs I have installed.