Well, I'm making progress. Booting up the Knoppix 3.8 CeBit stuff on my desktop with the USB wireless dongle installed is starting to work. After installing the drivers using ndiswrapper I get blinking lights on the dongle. The Knoppix WANsetup tool does a little bit of magic as well. It doesn't talk yet though.

So, it looks like some of the newer software on the 3.8 disk is what was required. I suspect it was the later version of ndiswrapper.

Now I'll re-image the laptop HDD and give it a go. No point in proceeding with the desktop at this stage.

Wish me luck...