HELP!! Working networking suddenly dies

I've been using Vista on a new laptop for about 6 weeks. No problems
until this afternoon. I use both a LAN connection and a wifi connection.

Today I was in the middle of transfering 3 5GB files from an XP system to
my laptop, when suddenly all 3 transfers failed. Further investigation
showed that ALL networking on the system was gone.

* "ipconfig" says that all adapters show "Media disconnected."

* "ipconfig /renew" won't do anything to a disconnected adapter.

* Rebooting the system changes nothing.

* There are no obvious errors in the Event Viewer.

* Device Manager says both the wifi and LAN devices are "working
properly." I tried uninstalling the LAN driver so I could re-discover
it, but nothing seemed to happen.

* Device Manager says my VMware virtual adapters were disabled. I re-
enabled them without trouble. That caused the VMnet1/VMnet8 adapters to
wake up and get IP addresses! So the networking subsystem is not totally
dead. VMware was not running at the time. Several tunnel adapters
picked up IPv6 addresses around that point but I don't know if they're
related to VMware.

* Out of desperation I tried disabling and re-enabling my wifi and LAN,
but no change. Wifi and LAN are still "Media disconnected."

What on earth has happened, and how can I fix it??? I'm leaving early
tomorrow for a week-long business trip and I **NEED** this laptop to be
working!!!

Thanks,
Gary