Vista wireless usb problem

Hello I have a Compaq Presario cq50-130US notebook it has internal wireless which usually works fine except in my bedroom. My room is in the garage so the connection was spotty and tempermental. I bought a belkin USB wireless adapter for my laptop and it works good, except that every so often -sometimes and hour sometimes several hours- windows vista 'forgets' what it is. The icon in the task bar will say I'm connected to the internet but I can't open a web page, I try to manually disconnect and it won't bring up my connection window, I try to 'safely remove' the usb device but its not listed. I then have to reboot my laptop and it works again. Anyone have any idea why this might be happening, and what can be done to fix it?