Aside from failing NIC's are there any other devices that aren't functioning properly that would make you think registry corruption?

It's not a failing NIC per say. I would qualify the phenomenon as a failing IP configuration. The NICs show fine in Device Manager, all bindings are fine, all protocols, clients are in place. The only problem -- IP communication is down. And as was noted originally, the problem manifests itself via ipconfig /all returning just a header with not a single line of contents.

After an arbitrary NIC is uninstalled in Safe Mode the system is forced to reinitialize something and after that IP is fine for one session. After the next reboot we are back at square one.

This sequence is very consistent with a registry corruption theory in my opinion.

And to answer your question, "There are no other major problems I am aware of with this laptop."

I would definitely try running a repair install, just make sure the disk you use matches the service pack version that you have installed, otherwise you'll run into trouble. Repair install is about the only thing that will repair registry corruption aside from reformatting or rolling back to a previous system restore state (you said it's been going on for about a year so it's probably not possible to roll back that far).