Very Slow Connection

[#1]

At 08:00 this morning, I switched on my laptop, as usual... told it my password, and went to make my morning cuppa, while it booted up... all was fine and dandy... after about an hour, I shut down, as we were going out... but... missus wanted a phone number... so I re-booted, and when the desktop screen came up... I waited...... and waited... and waited... and waited... for about 3 or 4 minutes.... still no wireless connection..... clicked on email ( thunderbird) got the "not responding" message... clicked on Firefox..... no response whatever... tried the right click and " connect to a network"  but the message box did not appear... tried to get it to "Diagnose and repair"... just kept on cycling through ...but did nothing... 10 minutes later... still nowt.... so assumed I had picked up a virus, and shut down.. intending to sort it when we came home....
came home... booted up.. and same problem..... however... made a cuppa... and a bite to eat... and during my refreshments... the google search screen came up . and the wireless was connected... ( probably about 15 mins... but wasn`t timing it... and did not notice when it was OK. )..
so... just to be on the safe side.... I shut down... went into safe mode with networking,... and it connected ok... shut down  and re-booted,...  scenario number two (above line)  happened....
so being connected... and hoping it was ok... I decided to run a full scan with Avast.... went to the shop for some milk... came back ... still scanning.... when the scan finally finished it showed ..> " threat detected"... and three or four lines with adware  as the threat... so I clicked on Fix Automatically, and it gave me the green light....  (no virus or trojan types detected)..
so... shut down... and re-booted... and scenario number two happened...
have done a registry clean... with eusing reg cleaner... but still takes forever to "connect" my wireless to the router.... 
any ideas/suggestions as to what is causing it... and what can be done about it?

[#2]

Reboot your router, sometimes they can forget that they're meant to be a wireless device...

[#3]

Hmm... ok... will try that...

[#4]

I occasionally had issues with my old router where the router just decides to not let anything connect wirelessly or take an age to connect anything at all (wired seems to work, but accessing the router was slow going), and rebooting always fixed it, just think of it as a windows computer, when in doubt, reboot...

[#5]

Hah !... well.... just rebooted the router,... and then rebooted the laptop....  took 6.5 minutes to get wireless connection up..... then 1 minute from clicking the thunderbird icon to opening thunderbird... and 2 mins from clicking the firefox icon to opening the google search page.
so .. that did not work...
Gonna try a different edition of Vista.. ( on another hard drive )... and see how long that takes..... 
Watch this space...............

[#6]

Probably a windows issue then, or bad drivers, or a bad wifi card, etc., the usual fiddly things...

[#7]

Well, I couldn`t find my "other" windows hdd... so I put in one that I made up in Jan last year... with ZORIN on it... was very quick to load up...and as soon as the desktop pic was on screen, so was the wireless connection....  which "proves" the laptop wireless is working correctly... and also the router wireless connection/recognition....
as you say, it must be a windows issue... will have to have a dig around and see if I can find my "install" disc... and do a "repair" .... hopefully that should fix it...
(no I don`t have an "image" on the hdd... I have the disc )....  (vista home premium 32 bit SP1)... (got SP 2 on another disc)...

[#8]

being vista it will likely be a winsock problem,
iirc there was a workaround that involved editing the registry and changing the netsh stack interface values and changing the default value of the rwin
its been abour 5 years since I last touched vista (thank god) so I cant remember how I did it or what tutorial o followed at the time but iirc it was on a gaming related blog site because of problem experienced with the wireless zero interface, MS fixed the problem in windows 7 but there were similar problems around in w98 /me/xp but only with certain bits of the OS installed (not default parts) but anything can trigger the problem