Is PcLinuxOS fairly new? I downloaded it, and in the process, noticed that unlike most other distributions I've tried, it has only four releases.

Not really. Its a fork of Mandrake 9.x and has some elements from the 10.x release.

This is one terrific livecd to use. All hardware HD located automatically. I did a hard disk install on an 80GB usb drive.My printer is a Brother MFC420CN printer/scanner/fax/copy unit that is attached to a local home lan (port 6 of NETGEAR router. Understanding the procedures that Brother provides for drivers and cupswrappers can take some reading time, but it works!!
PCLinuxOS got wireless working immediately. My laptop all keys/functions work as expected. Over the years of different distros Red Hat, Suse 6, 9, Gentoo, and UBUNTU I have found ease of use, good ergonomic design, very good menus especially with PCLinuxOS Control Center.
My laptop rocks now....video editing w/ avidemux2
Burning VCDs w/ k3b, audio work done with audacity.Starting with a t'test drive' with PCLinuxOS quickly convinced me to install on a large USB connected drive. Installation time ~ 25 mins (I am old), updating adding packages another 2-3 hours. I am well pleased with PCLinuxOS met all my expectations. Gentoo 2006 missed a lot of my hardware. Ubuntu also missed some. Knoppix which I thought would win in hardware identication, but PCLinuxOS provided the quickest path to getting some serious tools together in a laptop (IBM R50e laptop)
This distro uses good graphics to help in cutting away confusion.

Well, I should try PCLOS again, because I could just download OpenOffice, I guess; but I was not impressed, because PCLOS is the only distro I have tried (others are Mandrake, MEPIS, Xandros, Knoppix and Debian) that didn't have OpenOffice included. I know that it's big and slow, yes, but I don't mind, and I pretty much expect any good distro to have it.

I am suprised you would not be impressed by a distro just because it missing a package that you can easily install from its repos. OOo is big and is a resource hog so many live distros don't include it in their package selection due to space restrictions. I don't think this is a major issue because usually you can install it on your own if you need it.

Yes, well, there is the other overriding reason that PCLOS didn't impress me: like most distros, it would not run my wireless network. If it had, I may have been willing to ignore the omission of OO.

Very few wireless chipsets are supported out of the box by most Linux distros, so this is not just a problem with PCLinuxOS. Try some more distros and you will find that problems with wireless are quite common.

Well, I wasn't trying to connect the network out of the box. I installed NDiswrapper on this PCLinuxOS liveCD (just to see if it would work at all). It did not. It detected the network, if I recall, but made no useful connection.

If PCLOS did not give you a working wireless connection then good luck with other distros.

Try the Mepis alpha release or the Ubuntu beta. Better wireless support is built in to the newer kernels.

Yes, but can't you upgrade any distribution to a newer kernel?

Certainly.

Well, for some reason, the one that my network almost always works in is Xandros. (Also Mandrake, but not since I reinstalled it after exploring other distros.) With at least one other distro (I forget which one), an option to switch from eth0 (ethernet) to eth1 (my wireless network) was not even available.

With a bit of manual configuration, you can get wireless to work on any distro. Also, you could have manually changed the network settings to use eth1 instead of eth0. I learn a lot by doing stuff manually if the GUI tools don't work (or there aren't any).

I imagine you could also copy the kernel config file from Xandros and use it as a basis to reconfigure a new kernel in your distro of choice. Hardware support is kernel dependent, not distro dependent. Though I will admit to not having experience with wireless so perhaps there's something I'm unaware of.

A new version of PCLinuxOS has been released. This is a "Mini-me" version in advance of the main 0.93 release for people who want to install a minimum set of apps for a working system then add what they want afterwards. It may not be the best for beginners.

The kernel is a custom 2.6.15 kernel with a few 2.6.16 backports, the DRM/MDE project stuff is being integrated so Xorg will run 3D on a larger variety of cards, including good performance on some ATi cards without ATi's (not very good) drivers. If will even run 3D on nvidia cards using the xorg "nv" driver albeit slowly.

You should see some improvements in Wifi detection (though not perfect by a long chalk). Expect the full 0.93 very soon.