Wow, what a pain....I suspect you're correct and that somehow, either windows update or another third party driver update utility (not sure if you use anything like Driver Agent or something similar) probably did update the adapter driver and caused this issue, however; I thought that in most instances that driver updates through the Windows Update utility were listed as optional updates, rather than critical updates and that the user has to physically select those in order for them to be installed.
Don't know what your next step is going to be and I don't want to influence one way or the other, but if you do choose to upgrade again, I would be interested in hearing how you are doing, immediately following the plain vanilla upgrade, without any subsequent updates of drivers or software. So please keep us posted if you decide to proceed....or not.