BartonT,
The Antenna Diversity is a known issue with the Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card.
The IP Address of 169.254 told me there was a communications problem. It's usually with the wireless router and the modem router and power cycling them usually corrects the problem.
To test your hard drive, run the full diagnostics and report back any error messages. How to Run the Dell™ Diagnostics Utility
On the Netgear Router, someone posted...
Uncheck a box in the Advanced Setup for wireless.
(uncheck) Enable 20/40 MHz Coexistence
Netgear explains:
Disabling this option allows your 2.4GHz wireless to stay in supporting the max speed. Enabling this option [coexistence] may reduce the max speed of your 2.4GHz wireless to the half when there is another wireless network detected in your environment; this is to avoid inteference between wireless networks and to get along with other wireless networks in the environment.
Rick