Wifi worked for months and now strange connection.

I have an old Dell Latitude CPIR laptop running Win2k (latest SP and
upgrades), and a PC running Win2k Server (also latest updates etc).
For about 5 or 6 months now I have had a USB Compex WLU11A (latest
drivers) on the PC and a Proxim Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card (latest
firmware and drivers) on the laptop. It has worked great. I also
have another Compex adapter that I could put on the laptop and it also
worked. I just need a connection between the two devices, and have
used AdHoc/Peer to Peer. Both support 128 bit WEP and I have used
that as well.

Just a few days ago I couldn't connect to the internet from my laptop,
or use my shared drives/printers. Both the PC and laptop indicated a
connection. After changing the settings (ssid and chan) to different
values and back it worked fine. However since yesterday this does not
fix the problem anymore. The compex system tray icon lights up blue
when it has a connection. It's blue right now, but in properties i
have Status: Ready, and empty values for signal strength and link
quality. If I go to site survey I can see my neighbors AP and my
laptop (signal of 99% or 100%). Similarly on the laptop with the
Orinoco it doesn't display the no connection bar graph (which has 1
red bar and a lightning bolt) but just an empty all white graph
instead of full green. It too lists that a connection exists but has
no values for signal or quality. If I list sites, the orinoco also
sees the neighbors AP and my PC.

I can connect to my neighbor's AP with either the compex in the PC,
the orinoco in the laptop, or the compex in the laptop, and in all
cases I get an actual signal strength and link quality. However with
any of these devices in the laptop or PC I cannot get a connection
(WEP or not) between my own laptop and PC. What would cause Peer to
Peer to suddenly stop working like this? By the way, I have since
uninstalled all of the drivers (including digging them out of the
windows directory) and management software of all devices and started
over from scratch. I also cannot pinpoint any specific
software/hardware changes to either the PC or laptop within the last
few weeks.

Anyone have any similar experiences? Any general help about what
would cause a connection to exist (as well as being able to detect
each other's SSIDs) but not being able to get a signal would help.

Thanks.
Matt