wireless halo light blinks intermittantly

I have a 6 month old Gateway m675prr laptop with a built in broadcom wifi chip.
Under Mepis 3.3 the halo light came on when MEPIS booted and I could control the access to to the wifi chip by pressing the toggle button which the blue halo light surrounded. The blue light would go on or off depending on if the wifi chip was turned on or off.

Running the 3.3.2.test03 disto, the halo light does not come on during the boot, and does not come on when I make a network connection using MEPIS OS CENTER. It does flicker on occasions during the intial setup in the OS center, and on occasions while I am surfing. The halo light refuses to respond to my toggle of the wifi button. That is, I cannot tell if I am turning on or off the wifi connection unless, of course, my laptop locks up, which it did the first time I tried messing around with the button.

Also, this distro release has not cured my sound problem. My sound still can be heard ONLY by plugging a headset into the MICROPHONE jack. but

I haven't tried testing my Kodak DX-6730 digit camera, which 3.3 cannot sense or load, but I have my doubts if 3.3.2 will do any better.

My 1GB Cruzer memory stick works just fine.

But, my SD memory card doesn't kmount.

So, it doesn't look like I will be upgrading to 3.3.2 at least as long as the wifi problem remains. This also makes me wonder about using Synaptic. If, during upgrading, will I inadvertently loose wifi functionality? Essentially, this is the same problem I encountered with SUSE, Mandrake and Fedora. As one progresses up the version chain by things that worked previously stop working or did not work as well. But, as long as an upgrade to any packages that are critical to me do not require me to upgrade to 3.3.2 I'll be OK.

GreyGeek