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Peter's bedside manner is notoriously lacking, but he did actually have a reasonable point: The problem with erasing and reinstalling is that, well, it erases everything, zeroing out any progress you might have been making towards a solution, destroying all available information on the state of the problem, and blowing away all work invested into other parts of your system, as well.

Mind you, I'm not saying it's never the most prudent thing to do; sometimes, a system is so badly broken that repairing it seems likely to be too painful, lengthy, and indeterminate. However, new Linux users tend to be much too quick to reach for that ultimate remedy -- just as they are for "fixing" problems by rebooting.

Additionally, although I can understand out of desparation attempting to reach a solution by reinstalling once, given that that measure failed to fix the problem, doing it again can only be expected to arrive at the same results, right? I'm sympathetic about your no-doubt frustrating situation, but one doesn't normally expect repeating the same unsuccessful tactic to be useful.

Without reviewing this (lengthy) thread again, I can't make a specific alternative suggestion off the top of my head. I will say that there have been some hardware-support problems, equally on Linux and on legacy proprietary OSes, where I eventually decided that the best use of my time was to drive down to my local surplus computer-parts store and buy a cheap alternative replacement piece of hardware (e.g., to do an end-run problem around some dodgy ethernet NIC, or a winmodem, etc.). That may or may not be a reasonable remedy in your situation, but it sometimes is.