Well I’ve decided to take another bash at getting the bcm43xx to work on my laptop ( HP nx6310 ). I’ve seen quite a lot of fixes in 2.6.20 so have uprgaded to that and everything appears to be working now – just needed to use the wl-apsta firmware with the bcm43xx_fwcutter. Will test against an ap next week ( even wpa_supplicant is loading fine now ).