Wifi device disappeared

I use fedora 17 64 bit with KDE
my wifi card stopped showing up as a network device under ifconfig (or under networking) wlan0

my first thought was that i had disabled it with f3 (the one that disables wifi in windows) but that only turns on bluetooth.

so im at a loss for how i disabled it in the first place and how i can enable it now.

dumb question but have you tried a different USB port?

Your USB port has problem. check for other port or make it change.