I did this post on Ubuntu, but no response; thought I'd try here.
I have a Dell 1747 laptop. Once I'm connected all works fine but, sometimes it takes forever to make connection. First I have to give Keyring password then I wait; some time goes by and the Wireless key with info filled out appears. I hit enter and it may come up again in a few minutes. I try disconnect and re-connect and eventually it connects and then it's great. Oh yeah it's fine on that other OS$$.
I'm wondering about this "ndiswrapper" thingy; would that help?
Here's a few bits of info:
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: Broadcom Corporation
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0
logical name: eth1
version: 01
serial: 00:26:5e:8f:cb:7b
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=5.60.48.36 ip=192.168.0.11 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
resources: irq:17 memory:f8000000-f8003fff
*-network
description: Ethernet interface
product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:20:00.0
logical name: eth0
version: 03
serial: 00:26:b9:ab:38:4d
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI latency=0 multicast=yes
resources: irq:37 ioport:5000(size=256) memory:f8404000-f8404fff(prefetchable) memory:f8400000-f8403fff(prefetchable) memory:f8420000-f843ffff(prefetchable)

Where do you get this information from? Are you using ndiswrapper?

Please post the output of 'lsmod', 'lspci', 'lspci -vvvn -s 08:00.0', 'iwconfig' and 'ifconfig -a'. After you failed to connect, please also post the output of 'dmesg'.