Network Bridge itself is unplugged??

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I've spent the last couple of hours trawling google and these
newsgroups trying to find an answer to my problem, but to no avail. I'm
hopeful that someone here may be able to help me.

The situation:
I've got a LAN NIC + Wireless NIC that are bridged. I also have a third
NIC connected to a cable modem, which I share using ICS with the
bridge. This has been working fine for the last 6 months. Until last
week.

The Problem:
The "Network Bridge", as it appears in 'Network Connections' has the
status of "Network cable unplugged." This is despite the fact that the
LAN NIC + Wireless NIC both say "Connected, Bridged". As a result, the
bridge is not given an IP and I've got zero communication with the
other clients on the network. If I remove either device, or both
devices from the bridge, they both work fine independantly. But because
I want to share the internet on both connections, I need to get the
bridge working.

Observations:
I have tried using loopback adapters to simulate a bridge and get the
same result of "Network cable unplugged." on the bridge.

If I attempt to use the network wizard, it gets a fair way into the
process, but fails just before creating the bridge, and gives me the
"unexpected error occured" message. It does create an entry in the
system event log (which doesn't occur when I manually create the
bridge):

Event Type: Error
Event Source: BridgeMP
Event Category: None
Event ID: 14605
Date: 15/04/2006
Time: 8:37:52 PM
User: N/A
Computer: MyPC
Description:
Bridge: The bridge's attempt to create its virtual miniport failed.


Now I'm stuck. I've removed, deleted & reinstall the drivers for both
NICs and the bridge several times. I've disabled all firewalls. I've
tried it in safe mode. I'm just running out of things to try now.

Any suggestions? I'd really appreciate the help. Reinstalling windows
is not an option btw.

.

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