university wireless :(

so i live on campus and use the universities 8021x connection through a variety of standard wireless g adapters. in xp i have to set up all the connection settings provided by the university, but in vista is pretty much plug and play (type in user name and password and it automatically configures). but what ends up happening is that it disconnects regularly and i end up having to type in the username and password often. sometimes ill type the info in 20 times in a row before it reconnects. sometimes the credentials box doesnt show up at all after disconnecting and i have to reboot to get it to show up again. (note this happens to a much lesser extent on XP but it does still occur). so i have a couple of questions...first being, when the enter credentials screen appears, the box that says "save this user name and password for future use" is greyed out. is there anyway i can get the machine to save my name and password so that it doesnt ask me 50 times everytime i get disconnected? second question, is there a way for me to reset the wireless connection so that when the credentials screen doesnt appear i dont have to reboot (disabling the device doesnt work, and ive tried tons of stuff to no avail)..third question, ive been reading up on aftermarket antennas, and came across one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833164135

could i hook that up to a regular wireless g card and mount it on my wall or would that be overkill? lol... and if i could, would that theoretically solve all these disconnection problems

i think there was a big (we are talking HUGE) problem when vista came out and started comming on laptops at universities because of this, the routers would get overloaded do the the constant connecting and disconnecting. I think there was a windows update for it. Try running windows update.

hehe, the irony. (doing a windows update on a wireless connection that is slower than 56k and cuts out intermittently to fix aforementioned problem) actually i am completely up to date. i took it to my parents house during xmas and used their internet. (600kbs a second ) i think im gonna go ahead and pick up that antenna theres a microcenter nearby that sells them so i can just try it and take it back haha

i know my friend had an issue with vista and chap authentication i think for his university. he told me its neither an option to setup in vista