I have a Compaq Presario F700 with a built in bcm4311 wireless card that I finally got working but it was a real pain and I'm not even sure why it works. Like you, the bcm43xx drivers would make the blue on light come on, but no networks where seen IIRC. Then I tried ndiswrapper and that wouldn't work and the blue light wouldn't come on. Fooling around trial and error, I finally got it working by running this sequence after booting up:
# rmmod bcm43xx
# rmmod ndiswrapper
# modprobe ndiswrapper
Also, I had to add bcm43xx to /etc/modprobe.preload:
Code:
# /etc/modprobe.preload: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are
# to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with
# a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored.
# this file is for module-init-tools (kernel 2.5 and above) ONLY
# for old kernel use /etc/modules
bcm43xx
nvram
amd64_agp
evdev
and /etc/modprobe.conf has
neither bcm43xx or ndiswrapper. Unless modprobe.preload and modprobe.conf were configured this way, the above sequence would not work and ndiswrapper would not work at all unless bcm43xx was loaded early in the boot process and later removed per my above code.
It seems to be a timing problem of some sort and the sequence appears to work around that. If you can get this sequence to work, you can automate the whole thing by editing rc.local to run those commands at the end of the boot process.