Upgrading Mandriva

This month I decided to upgrade my work laptop from 2007 to 2007.1 of Mandriva before the 2008 gets released in November! Attempted to upgrade but for some reason the upgraded system still thought it was 2007.0 and when applying updates it attempted to get the updates for that version. So swiftly cutting my losses - needing to get work done! - I went for a fresh install.
Overall I'm pretty happy -

• the version of the kernel that came with 2007 had a bug that meant the machine (an HP nx6325) tended to overheat - so I fixed the BIOS that that the fan was running when a mains supply was attached, this bug has now been eliminated and the temperature stays around 55 rather than zooming up to 75 when running a hefty compile!
  
• The fresh version displayed a bug with the graphics with a large corrupt cursor on my second monitor installing the ati drivers.
  
• Our application which gets the machine id sometimes was getting 0 in 2007 for licensing, so far hasn't misbehaved - previously I was having to relicence the application every few days.

My only bugbear is the wireless networking - I eventually got this working a few days ago - I use it at home but not at work - however it keeps locking the machine up! As I wrote on alt.os.linux.mandriva:

I was using 2007 with which ndiswrapper worked well for my home wireless connection on a HP nx6325 however with 2007.1

I initially tried using the builtin driver, couldn't get that to work - getting messages something like 'unable to find bcm43xx driver' so I went back to using ndiswrapper, the instance with 2007.1 didn't seem to work so - after a bit of googling and seeing comments on the
ndiswrapper with 2007.1 - I've installed 1.47 from the tar download (getting rid of the rpm first).
If I'm very careful this - the wireless connection - works for me (having blacklisted bcm43xx) however it appears that if anything is attempting to use a network connection when the wireless is in - I think - an unconnected or initialising state the machine locks up and
the only way out is the power button :-(

Typically I'll see this by doing
modprobe ndiswrapper
... for the moment I've commented out the reference to ndiswrapper in
modprobe.conf ... and the system immediately locks.

I'm using 2.6.17-15mdv and have installed bcmwl5 for ndiswrapper to use.

Anyone seen these symptoms and have a solution?