I have done all I know to do (which I'll admit isn't much). Mint 9 came with ndiswrapper already installed so all i had to do was track down the .inf on my windows partition and bam, it was installed and detecting the hardware. Now my problem is when I use ifconfig and iwconfig I only show lo, eth0, and pan0, none of which I seem to be able to configure for wireless access. It seems like when I tried linux the very first time years ago, I was able to get the wireless running once it was showing wlan0. I can not figure, for the life of me, how to get that stupid wlan0 to show up. Linux gods of the internet, please hear my prayers and help me before I start cussing at my computer and threatening to throw it out the window.

It may be that you need to

Do

first, if it outputs a line then you don't need to and the bug is elsewhere, otherwise that modprobe command will load in ndiswrapper's module and your wireless device should be picked up. See mintWifi's documentation for full info.

Thank you for your help. I finally ended up going to the tutorials section and followed the instructions to get a broadcom card to work and now I'm up and running. Guess I should've done that first :-P