My saga of ndiswrapper on the macbook continues.
In fact, the dw102 drivers do cause crashes when associating with
certain access points. Unfortunately the dw101 drivers don't work with
certain (still other) access points, and the lenovo "abgn" drivers have some
very peculiar problems with extremely bad UDP performance
on the access points the dw101 don't work with.
It occurred to me after a few hours of trolling for better drivers that, in
fact, there is a better way. Apple ships windows drivers specifically
for this exact card! You don't need to use drivers for
some other card with the same (or vaguely similar) chipset.
The Macintosh Drivers For Windows CD included with Boot Camp contains the
driver. Obnoxiously, it's encapsulated within a MSI file, within an EXE
installer, within a DMG image, inside the Boot Camp application. The only
way I could discover to get at the wireless driver was to install the whole
thing on a Real, Actual Windows Computer.
To access the driver CD if Boot Camp won't let you burn it, ctrl-click on
"/Applications/Utilities/Boot Camp Assistant.app" and click on "Show Package
Contents". Then, double-click on "Contents/Resources/DiskImage.dmg". Copy
the files on the thing that shows up on your desktop onto a USB key or
similar method of conveyance to a Windows machine, and run the
installer.
Obnoxious as this process is, it thankfully doesn't make you
install to a Windows installation on a Real Actual MacBook Core 2 Duo
laptop. Any old Windows machine will do. The installer helpfully puts
all the drivers into "C:\Program Files\Macintosh Drivers for
Windows XP 1.1.2". The files for the network card are in the "net5416"
folder.
Of course, they're also in a file called "net5416.tar.bz2" on my hard disk.
I think Apple might take a dim view of me providing a public download site
bereft of their unethical and
legally dubious EULAs, but if you can't get at the drivers for some
reason maybe I could let you have a copy.