Torch 9850 on at&t - speradically working

hello, I've been able to get tether to work about 4 times now. I've been desperatly trying to figure out what the issue is. I've tried resetting the service, rebooting both devices (laptop + phone), and all sorts of things. The connection says its good (via usb) and the logs show a successful connection. It normally gets about a burst of 38 packets through then sits (it will then make it up to about 100 packets after about 10 mins). The machine receives an ip address (win7) but I cannot ping the route and traffic hangs - then times out. Any idea what my problem might be? When it works - it works great. But im sitting here with 4/5 bars and am starting to get real frustrated :(