USB Wi-Fi adapter doesn’t wakeup on Windows Vista

"Have you looked in your BIOS settings to see if there are any options for USB settings? Also, have you tried something else like a USB hard drive to see if that spins back up after waking the computer from sleep? That may help see if the problem is with the adapter or the port.

Lastly, I'd move the adapter to another machine to see if it does the same thing (ideally one using XP or a different OS than you're currently using)."

"Also check the Advanced Power Options. Vista can be set to turn off the USB ports to save power.

Since your WiFi device is USB-based, that may be the problem."

In the Windows Device Manager, I would check to see if the USB Wi-Fi adapter has any power-related settings in its hardware configuration. I know that I've remedied various wakeup issues with Wi-Fi cards and Windows Vista by adjusting their settings within the Device Manager (but never a USB adapter, so this is a bit of a crapshoot).

"On Windows Vista, I had some troubles with the Wi-Fi startup until I add the following script at startup.

net stop Wlansvc
net start Wlansvc"