WiFi woes

[AK Dave]

I see that iwconfig says you have a wireless adapter, so I don't think this is a driver issue.

Looks like you're having a DHCP problem. Is your router correctly configured?

I'm confused at ifconfig. It looks like you have a wired connection active. I find that neither Mint nor Ubuntu can support having both wired and wireless active at once. This may be no more difficult than unplugging a network cable and L-clicking the network icon on your toolbar.

I do recommend, if you have a home router that allows this, disabling DHCP on your laptop and using a static IP.

[AK Dave]

damnedest thing. Now iwconfig isn't seeing your wlan0.

It detects your 3945, ndiswrapper loads drivers, but iwconfig doesn't see a wlan0.

If you go to Control Panel -> Network you should get the interface to manually configure your networking specs. Usually "roaming" works great. Sometimes you have to hand-code and coddle it. But that shouldn't be your problem, because right now it all hinges on iwconfig not seeing a wlan0.

[AK Dave]

I would have just had you manually blacklist the drivers one at a time.

Set your MintUpdate to only update level 1&2 updates.

[MagnusB]

That card is supported with open source drivers from Intel, and is reported to be a bit buggy with ndiswrapper. I think the first issues was that you have to many drivers installed in ndiswrapper, which caused a conflict, and it still can be a conflict if you have iwl, mac80211 and one more module loaded.

Did you first try to install drivers through ndiswrapper, or did you check if you had a working wireless before starting with windows drivers? Also, take a look at http://intellinuxwireless.org to see the official (Intel) instructions for that chipset.