I am running Slackware 12.1 on a HP Compaq 6715s. It has a Broadcom 4312 wifi card wich works either with ndiswrapper or b43 driver. My problem is this: the laptop has a physical button(right near the Power button) that turns wifi card on/off; if I boot slackware with wifi turned on, everything works great,but when I boot with wifi turned off, and then I press the wifi button to turn it on, the card is not detected (or at least I suppose so - it is not listed on lspci). On the other hand, on F****G W*****S turning wifi on/of by pressing that button works with no problem. So, my question is how can I make slackware do the same? I understood that "udev" is in charge to detect various devices but restarting udev doesn't detect the card.

Thank you for any help.

I don't know if installing wicd would help, but you could try it.
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12.1/network/wicd/

brian, i think it is not a network manager problem. i tried wicd some time ago and it did not solved the problem. i think it is about hardware detection as far as the system does not detect the "physical" wifi card when i start the pc with wifi turned off. it is like the wifi card does not exist. and this should be correct as long as the card is not powered at all during the system boot. But when i turn on the card ( and i mean powering on) after system boot, the system should detect it (even this will require a manual udev restart) and get wlan0 up and running. wich it doesn't. so my simple question is "what process is responsible for hardware detection that it should be ran/restarted in order to detect the wifi card?"

Maybe this should help. I mean, the "Network subsystem" section might give you some clue.