I’m sitting at the Genius Bar waiting for the Genius to come back from the back room where he was probably googling my symptoms.
And now he’s back with some strange theories about a magic keyboard shortcut that disabled my Airport. And now he’s installing some third party software called OnyX. He keeps saying “well it’s still connected” and I keep reminding him that yesterday it failed three times in 5 hours (ie about once every 1.66 hours) and we’ve only been looking at it for half and hour, so that’s no indication of anything.
Oh well, next stop I’ll have to try something more drastic like ‘archive and reinstall’.
Update: After OnyX ran, the computer rebooted. I had to go to my chiropractor appointment, so I was walking out the store as it rebooted, and then while I was still in the store, the damn Airport turned off. I showed it to the Genius, and he said “Oh, that’s what you meant – oh, that’s definitely software”. I don’t understand why he didn’t understand what I meant at that point – when I described it the first time, the other guy behind the Genius Bar said “oh, you mean the pie wedge goes completely white”, and I confirmed that was exactly what I meant. I also don’t understand his conclusion. We’ll see.
If you’re running 10.5.x then 10.5.7 (due out real soon now) fixes a huge amount of wireless problems.
Refresh my memory: have you gone to Apple System Profiler when this occurs and seen if the airport card is still shown? When I had this problem with Bluetooth the actual Bluetooth interface would disappear. That’s why I suspected it might be a hardware or firmware problem and suggested resetting PRAM and SMC. If you haven’t done this—and I’m sorry if I didn’t suggest it earlier—try it the next time it occurs. That would be pretty good proof that it’s not a magic keyboard shortcut.
Onyx IMHO is a decent tool that cleans caches and runs system scripts that might not get run if your machine is sleeping or off when they’re scheduled to run. Not sure if it will really help here, but it won’t hurt.