Wireless showing DNS Errors - No Internet Access

Hopefully this article will help someone who's had the same issues I had.

I have a Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card and Windows 7, and for the past couple of days I was beyond frustrated because my wireless laptop was not able to access the Internet.  It was able to previously, but all of a sudden something happened that caused me not to be able to.

At first I thought it was my router so I rebooted it, even changed it back to it's default settings to no avail.  I was able to connect just fine to the router and get a strong signal, but I just couldn't get on to the Internet.  I took it to work thinking that I would need a new router but when I connected to the work router, the same thing happened again.  The thing is that just a couple days before I was actually able to connect to my work router.  

I ran the Windows diagnose program and it told me that I was having errors with the DNS. The DNS?  WHAT? Usually I get that error if I'm on a work network, not if it's just me in my house with one router.

But anyways.  I searched Google and tried repairing winsock, with all these commands, but nothing worked:

ipconfig /flushdns
                      
                      ipconfig /release
                      
                      ipconfig /renew
                      
                      ipconfig /whatinthehell?
                      

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I did notice that I was able to ping by IP address, but not by name.

After more searching around, I finally found out what the problem was.  In my network connections settings, I had a Virtual adapter named:

Microsoft Virtual WiFI Miniport Adapter

I right clicked on it and disabled it, and within seconds I had Internet access again.  I never even noticed I had that virtual adapter, or should I say I didn't pay attention to it because I thought it was a part of VMWare that I have installed on my laptop.  And as you know, when you install VMWare it creates it own virtual adapters as well.

But that was it, after days of frustration it all came down to a simple click.  I do hope this helps someone else out who has or is facing this problem.

Good luck!