Why Don't Blind Men Go Sky Diving? Because It Scares The Shit Out Of The Dog!
I've spent most of the morning with my wireless cutting in and out, cause unknown. I powered down everything for awhile, then fired it all back up. Better but not fixed. For one thing, the signal strength was down to 40%. Gak!
So I started playing with the antennas. I'd built a couple of slip-on parabolic reflectors some time back and ended up not using them. I tried one on the PC end. That made it worse. It went down to 18%!
At the router end, I had a flat panel antenna connected to one of the two antenna connections. I replaced it with the original antenna. Improvement. Shouldn't have, though. So I started moving things around. I put the flat panel on the other antenna connection and a parabolic reflector on the first one. Then I put a parabolic reflector on the PC end again. Signal is now up to 92%. I have no idea what's going on, but things seem to have stabilized. The question is whether that's because of anything I did or either the router or the USB wireless on the PC fixed itself. In the end, I still don't know what the problem is, but at least it's working again. What a waste of bleeping time.
(For my own reference, my PC uses a LinkSys Wireless-G USB network adapter, and the router is a LinkSys WRT54G, using WPA-Personal encrypting.)