wireless to wired problem

Hello,

On my Dell Inspiron 8600 running XP pro, a strange problem began just
this morning. Prior to today, if I was connected to our wireless
network, but then inserted an ethernet cable into the laptop's nic
card, XP would recognize that I no longer wanted to be connected
wirelessly and would immediately switch my connection over to my
ethernet adapter from the wireless adapter. Suddenly, I no longer get
this automatic "handoff" if I insert an ethernet cable - with an
ethernet cable inserted, XP still "thinks" I'm connected wirelessly,
prompting me for my wireless username/password. What I have to do now
is right click on my wireless connectoid, select "disable" and then
and only then will XP begin to use my ethernet connection. This works
fine, but as I said, the process used to be seamless - I never had to
disable the wireless connection before.

Any ideas what happened and how I can get back to an automatic
wireless-to-wired handoff like I had before? Any help is much
appreciated.

Dave