Unable to scan for wifi

[tpayne]

or save a network. When I enable wifi on my incredible nothing happens so I go into settings and try to connect manually by putting in the ssid name etc. but it never works. I've read that the only solution for this is a hard reset which brings up 2 questions:

Is there any fix besides a hard reset?
Is there a way to keep everything I have like apps, contacts, personal settings while doing a hard reset? Can it be backed up?

thanks in advance