well, at least I can take some comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one that's having issues. Oh jeez, where to begin....
I guess I'll start with the Edimax EW-7128G which uses the Ralink RT61 chipset. This was the beginning of my issues. When I first loaded the windows 7 beta on here, it kept hard crashing on me. slowly I started to pinpoint what was wrong and found out that it was the card/drivers that was the culprit. Getting frustrated with it hard crashing for the 100th time, I decide to look for a new solution. First it was making a wireless bridge. Worked wonders for a while, until it kept dropping the connection. Thinking the DD-WRT router made bridge was the culprit, I decide to flash a newer firmware on it, which proceeded to brick said router. After that I began my journey of finding a suitable wireless card for this thing. This is what I found, all with varying degrees of failure.
Dynex DX-BGDTC: tried loading the drivers. Device manager sees it as unrecognized. yay
netgear WG311v3: same thing, only device failed to start.
Encore ENLWI-G2 using the realtekRTL8185 chipset: it "works," and by "works" I mean it can connect to my router, but when it tries to make a connection to a website, it has trouble. it'll download fine once it makes that connection though.
I have yet to see any card that manages to work "well" on windows 7 64-bit and it's starting to piss me off. ;/
if anyone wants to offer some insight on getting either the edimax(Ralink) or the Encore(Realtek) working properly, then by all means go for it.