This is a topic that seems to go on forever.

The only way I got past it was to use a WiFi dongle that was made to
work with Linux.

ns wrappers work, but that was just to much for me. Now my system
just works because of a $20US USB card. The major problem I have seen
while getting up to speed is the amount of stuff made for windows,
that takes a lot of time to use with other OSes. One of the worst in
my bood is WiFi adapters because of FCC involvement.

I moved to Ubuntu because I was unhappy with Vista, the price I paid
for hardware (WiFi addapter) was far less than the frustration
involved making hardware work that was designed for only windows.
Face the fact that although smaller market share that what MAC has in
the OS world, MS looks at linux as a big contender. Designing an OS
to keep out competition can be accomplished by having hardware
companies that want windows to work on there stuff to make
requirements that are proprietary or close to it.

There are many cards that work well with Linux, I show one that I use
on my blog here http://simplyrv.imnugget.com/wifi-update/ . I show
this card because I have had very good luck with it, it is not the
only card that works on Linux, just the one I use.