IMac and Airport problems

Hello All - be gentle with me - Im not very techie and Im a windows refugee! so Im not well versed in the ways of Mac fully yet!!
Im having a problem with my iMac (which i love) and airport wifi..... The iMac is 5 months old and is running OS x 10.5.6 I am using a wireless Netgear modem/router on 802.1n. I have 100% signal strength in the Airport Status bar and it connects perfectly.....however about 4-5 minutes the signal just disappears and the Airport status bar greys out and I lose my wifi connection. When you click on the Airport in the status bar, even the network name has disappeared, and then about 20 seconds later it reappears and reconnects itself automatically. Its like the card is turning itself off and then back on again and rebooting and its doing it like clockwork.
I didn't really notice it at first, but it came to light when i bought a Time Capsule - which after 10 days of failed back ups I took back to the shop thinking it was that that was faulty.
As the problem is still there, i figured it might be a router/modem issue so i got our IT guy to check all the settings and he confirmed it was properly set up and working fine.
I've just bought a Mac Air Book also running Leopard 10.5.6 and the weird thing is that the Airport connection on that is bullet proof, as is the wireless connection on my daughters Windows XP Profession SP3 lap top - which leads me to conclude it has to be either a faulty airport card in the iMac or some sort of software issue ??
Any one got any suggestions how to fix the issue - as its driving me nuts! Is this a known issue ?

OK - this is early days, but this fix touch wood appears to have worked (after spending hours on the phone to Apple Support (who in fairness were very helpful)).
We tried all the usual routes - run disk checker, resolve conflicts, moving plists out of the library - exactly the same, if not worse.
Then we tried this - which HAS worked so far - 24 hours and it hasn't dropped once.
Dig out Disc 1 that came with your mac and put in to the drive. Click on the Apple logo. and then select - OSX Software. The Mac will want to restart - let it.
You then need to tell it to install OS X again. MAKE SURE you click the Install and ARCHIVE option - if you dont it will wipe your disk and all your settings and data. The Archive option basically saves all your settings and reinstalls them once the software has reinstalled.
My iMAC came with OS X 10.5.2. - once all this had reloaded (mine took about 2hours) - airport worked fine. Then the problem arose - my iMac is set up to automatically download and install updates - after about 10 mins, it beetled off to check, then loaded and installed Mac OS X 10.5.6 update together with Aiport Utility 5.3.2; Quicktime 7.6; Remote Desktop client 3.2.2; iTunes 8.0.2; and Frontrow 2.1.6 - it managed to download the whole lot in one go - about 750mb seemlessly without falling over - as soon as it installed however - my wifi connection went down.... :o(
So I figured there had to be a problem with one of the updates - so i started from scratch again and install/archive OS X 10.5.2. I then turned off the auto install updates feature, so i could manually install each update in turn, to see which one it was that upset Airport.
I found that if you download and install the updates 1 by 1 - then Airport remains happy....
I did it in this order..
Remote Desktop
Quicktime
iTunes
Airport Utility
Front Row
OS X 10.5.6
As I say i dont know if this is a permanent fix, but in 24 hours it hasn't dropped wifi once, and that's way longer than it has survived for the last 2 months.....
I have no idea why this apparently seems to work either - but it does seem to have cured it....

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