What is your impression of my diagnosis and idea to build a custom kernel to run the Intel provided binary instead of the malfunctioning open-source version?

Also, I did a little reading on the scripts you mentioned; I don't understand why you wrote what you did. It seems to me that the scripts exist and are executed without regard to which kernel a person might be booting, no? The run levels are the same between the kernels, and there's only one copy of the sets of scripts for each run level. Do the scripts make references to the kernel and sometimes execute and sometimes not depending on whether the kernel is a 486 or 686? Where is this found?

For anyone who might read this in future:
Recompiling the kernel was learning process. After following the instructions on how to do it in order to prepare for installing Intel's older but mature & functional ipw driver, I discovered I could not compile the kernel module. Intel's make file only produced lots of errors. linux/config.h no longer exists, for example, in the kernel source...that can be just commented out...other errors are beyond me. I found a thread somewhere in which someone tried for a long time to get it to compile and no luck. It is impossible.

I went back to my 686 kernel and installed wicd. It works. It appears there are bugs everywhere, not only in the firmware but also in Network-manager, regarding wireless. Don't bother with a kernel recompile or the older Intel firmware and drivers--it would be nice to go back to something that works but perhaps others have decided otherwise.