Ok I am runing Debian 3.1rc3 "Sarge" on a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a Dell 1450 wireless card. I installed ndiswrapper and got the card working with the windows driver. Two days ago, the system would lock when on boot, when it reached "modprobe ndiswrapper" in /etc/modules, so I removed it from there and was still able to use the card by doing a modprobe ndiswrapper from the terminal, once the system was loaded. Then today, it started locking up when I ran modprobe ndiswrapper from the terminal. I have read that this might have something to do with the kernel stack size set at 4k and that it should be set to 12k. But that wouldn't explain why it was working and now it is not?

Did you do any upgrades or kernel builds?

No, I am running the 2.6.8-2 i386 kernel that came with the install.

Does it lock up immediately or after a while? Have you tried upgrading ndiswrapper?

The machine locks up as soon as I hit enter on the modprobe ndiswrapper command. I assume that I have the lastest version of ndiswrapper, I used apt-get to get it about two or three days ago!

That upgrade of ndiswrapper didn't happen to coincide with the problems beginning, did it?

No, I didn't. I installed the ndiswrapper, not upgrade.

Oops, sorry, I misunderstood you. How long was ndiswrapper working before problems started occuring?

I installed Debian on sunday, then I got the wireless card working on monday, with the entry modprobe ndiswrapper in /etc/modules. Then on tuedays, it started locking up on boot, so I took that /etc/modules entry out and could still get the card going with modprobe ndiswrapper from the terminal and then today, it would lock up at the terminal as soon as I did the command. I am going to try and uninstall the driver with the ndiswrapper -e command and reinstall it and see if that does anything.

Nope, reinstalling the driver didn't do anything!

Ok, I think I have my have gotten a fix, at least for now. The same time that I had had the first modprobe ndiswrapper lock up, I complied the kernel with some support for an experimental ACPI suspend option, so I took that back off and complied and modprobe ndiswrapper is working for now!

Hrrm, odd, I wonder how they interact with each other.