What happened?

Any whizz kids have any idea what went wrong..

Windows 7.
I took my eyes off the AAO for 2 minutes. When I looked back the wireless network icon had a big fat red cross through it so rebooted the router and the machine. No luck. Booted into XP Pro, same thing. Both device managers reported there was no wireless device in the machine. Despite using Add New Hardware in XP, adding it and with the right driver, I still couldn't get any joy. So I thought hell, I'll reinstall XP Pro (Ron's Tiny XP as before). Set the AAO to boot from the USB and was about to install when I remembered I needed a file off the HDD first. So I set the boot order back to the Hitachi.
Bang. Nothing. No boot screen, no boot.
After much soul and Google searching I managed to flash the BIOS (with what I thought was 3309.. BIOS says 3114??) and resurrect the bloody thing. Wireless works fine now. Atheros shows in both device managers.

So, any idea what went wrong? Where did the Atheros go? What caused the lack of boot leading to a BIOS flash?
And do I have the latest now, and if not, how come - I downloaded 3309..
*shrug*

Cheers and TIA.

:edit: re-flashed and correct BIOS version shows now.