Possible Left I/O Board Failure?

Well this all started a little over a month ago. Out of no where, my Mac would hang while using Safari. Then in a matter of moments, I started receiving the "No airport card installed" error message -- pretty common after doing some research. However, NONE of the posted solutions solved my problem. Trust me, I tried them ALL so I won't go into detail regarding the possible "solutions." I will state that I made sure my Airport Extreme card was properly seated and that the left I/O board was correctly installed as well. All-in-all, everything is connected as they should be. I narrowed the issue down to a hardware fault instead of a software issue considering the Snow Leopard DVD did not recognize the Airport card either. Nonetheless, I reformatted anyway. Still no Airport card. System Profiler only recognizes ethernet, bluetooth, and firewire... No Airport. Considering this thing is from 2006, it occurred to me that its days might be numbered -- I have quite a few wifi devices. Anyways, with that in mind, I decided to steal the Airport card out of my 1st gen AppleTV. Though they aren't the same, I figured it was worth a short. Well, it didn't work. HOWEVER, the opposite did. I inserted my thought-to-be-dead Airport card from my Macbook Pro into the AppleTV and IT WORKED. So, this tells me that the Airport Extreme card IS functional. Now that I have narrowed the problem down as far as I can, does this mean the issue lies within the left I/O board? It charges just find, audio in and out works, and the USB port is fully functional. Is it possible that just the mini PCIe port is broken? Whether or not that is true, I would still have to replace the entire I/O board.

Does anybody have any last-ditch efforts for me to try? This thing has been a rock -- only needing a RAM, hard drive, and OS upgrade for 5 years. I'd hate to lose this but can't put too much money into it. The left I/O card isn't the cheapest part. I know I could just stick with wired internet, but depending on what exactly has failed, I don't want to risk compromising the whole system.

I guess I could sum this up in a nutshell:

Macbook Pro does NOT recognize Airport card but AppleTV does. ::sigh::