Linux Wi-Fi woes

I mentioned in my last post that pretty much all I had to do to get my MVP working properly was to update the wireless card to an 11g one, but unfortunately this isn't seeming too easy! :(

I bought a Belkin PCI Wi-Fi card(F5D7000uk) that is based on the Ralink rt2500 chipset. This is the 11g version of the 2400 chipset I've been using for over a year without a single problem so I thought it would be relatively easy to set up, but no such luck!

There are two types of open source drivers available for this chipset, either the standard rt2500 ones, or the newer rt2x00 version. However I have problems with both: the rt2500 drivers don't work with SMP enabled which is apparently turned on in the KnoppMyth kernel, where as the rt2x00 drivers require a kernel version 2.6.13 or higher where as I have 2.6.11 from KnoppMyth RA16.

Given that I couldn't use the open source drivers, I noticed that this card seems to be supported by ndiswrapper, so I thought I would give this a go.
After downloading and installing (using the A-Link windows drivers mentioned) it seemed to be working fine, but it doesn't last long!!
With all the different versions of ndiswrapper/drivers I've tried, none seem to stay up for more than a day or so!! :(

So it looks like I'm left with either recompiling my kernel to disable SMP support (I'm running an AMD Sempron so don't need it!) or upgrading to either a newer kernel or a newer KnoppMyth version.

I don't really like the sound of any of these options, as I don't want to break my otherwise working setup!
The other problem is finding some time when there's not something on TV I want to record! :)