Really odd situation here. Drivers don't sort of work usually. They either totally fail or totally work. I guess it could be some very poorly written driver that fails to identify your device and some buffer is being missed or such.

A driver for the most part is one of three ways. One is built in to the kernel. Most people see this and it just works out of the box. Two is they add in either to the kernel or outside kernel. Third is to use windows drives under ndiswrapper.

I'd boot to a live mint 13 cd/dvd and see if it fails there. Be sure to check the iso you have and burn at slowest speeds or make a live usb.

Modprobe is a tool for drivers. http://linux.die.net/man/8/modprobe see bottom for other tools that help.

So I used a Fedora live disc to start up the computer (no longer have the mint linux usb), and I am still having the same problem. And I noticed another problem, my usb hub isn't able to use USB devices, I get an error code.

If fedora and mint exhibit the same issue then maybe there is something wrong with the device?

How do you determine you have tcp errors?

Well first off, I figured out it was layer specific b/c I can download massive files, i.e. the fedora disc image without any problems. I then used hard info to check the network statistics, and after a very short period of time, it was saying I was having hundreds of TCP errors. also, a check of fedora's logs said that it was also using the ath5k driver.