bugster, I have a difficult wireless card also, mine is blacklisted almost everywhere. But, I got it to work with Mepis pretty easily. There's a web forum specifiaclly for mepis folks, I am not sure I can mention that here, but, that's where I got help with this.
First thing, in a mepis Konsole do this:
that will tell you about devices attached to the bus, wireless card shows at the bottom of the file...if the system sees it, then it will be on that list, else not.
please post the output of lspci here (just cut and paste from console).
next
start>internet>network connections>mepis network assistant
at that window you have some things to set up. it's really important to use the right setup here, or it won't work. For me it was "enable broadcom", might be different for you. I used "use dhcp for dns"...then I goto troubleshooting tab. Click on the "scan hardware" button, is your card there? next click on "list linux drivers". this has to match the former driver response...ndiswrapper vs broadcom someother (me).
exit and reboot mepis. lspci should now show your wireless card on your system
that should be it, afterward when I went to knetwork manager, the network would show up under wireless and lspci showed the card installed. done.
try that and see if it helps.