joe_intel .. another data point.
background
purchased dell m2800 customized. explicitly picked what i thought was the better wireless option of intel 7260 dual band wireless. foolishly assumed that with win7-64 and intel any driver issues would have been sorted out long ago. do not recall what driver shipped from dell but it was garbage with only 30 second connectivity to my netgear_wnr2000v3 running ddwrt which up till now had zero problems with any other card (my previous laptop was thinkpad T500 with intel AGN). after changing a few options (since changed back on both router and wireless card) i found this thread. dell still provides the 17.0.5.8 version driver as the most recent for this laptop. I believe that had serious connection issues but I havent gone back to check. using the dell driver update tool and wired access I was able to install v. 17.1.0.19 which has been very stable except for the common wake after sleep issue. I long ago checked "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" which did not help. I could reliably put laptop to sleep, wake, and have the wireless card stuck with the driver claiming the card was not functioning as others have reported in this thread. performing disable/enable from device manager would easily get the wireless back into working order. I just rechecked the thread and saw the discussions around driver version 17.12.0.4. I'm leary of installing drivers from random exe files from the internet but I didn't notice anyone reporting having all their bank accounts stolen so I decided to risk it even though dis/enable is only slightly annoying. i downloaded exe. unzipped it. then from device manager chose update driver for the wireless card and selected the win7 directory. windows quickly updated it without issue. immeditately after without reboot I put computer to sleep and woke it up. wireless immediately restored. I still have "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" checked. i'll update if I notice any other issues as I use it more but so far everything seems solid. huge thanks to the community for nailing down this issue with minimal help from intel. hopefully they will eventually get solid drivers out through official channels. until then this is another vote for the 17.12.0.4 driver. another random note. one of the issues I noticed with the drivers before 17.1.0.19 was that even when it seemed stable I could usually cause the wireless card to crash if guild wars 2 updated, which I presume stressed the connection with large packets and/or many simultaneous tcp connnections. with 17.1.0.19 i noticed only the resume from sleep issue.
current settings
dell m2800 i7 16GB ram
win7-64 pro
intel v17.1.0.19 driver and software installed from intel driver update tool
intel v17.12.0.4 driver only updated from expanded .exe provided by crcinau
"Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" checked
wireless appears to reconnect from sleep without issue. seems to have no problems connecting to slightly older wireless router now. no known issues at this point.
Thank you very much crcinau for providing what appears to be a fully functional driver.
UPDATE 20150110: for the most part 17.12.0.4 is reasonably stable however I have had at least two cases where I lose "internet access" (per the windows wireless status) during large downloads. disabling/re-enabling wireless driver restores access and both times everything proceeded normally so while it def fixed the sleep issue for me it still seems buggy with my router and large downloads. its been rare enough I'll probably stay with 17.12.0.4 for now. i still hope intel comes up with a more stable driver one of these days.