As I’m using network manager to control wireless access on my laptop and a desktop computer in my home, I’ve decided that the keyring manager is a nuisance.
I couldn’t bear for it to constantly ask for a password every time that I needed to log on to a wireless network to retrieve the stored password. [...]

I’ve just spent 3 hours playing around with trying to get wireless to play nicely.
Thankfully, after attempting various HOW-TOs that are out there, I managed to use the Windows drivers from the Linksys FTP site with ndiswrapper.
I also installed network-manager to get the whole thing rolling, and the wifi worked immediately after the final reboot.
If [...]