wireless + ndis on Compaq TC1000 revisited

[John Nielsen]

This is a bit of a followup to my post of over a year ago:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-November/020289.html

I've been playing with FreeBSD on the TC1000 Tablet PC again lately and 
brought it up to 6-STABLE. Compaq still has the same (Windows) drivers for 
the built-in wlan device as they did the last time, and it still doesn't 
work with ndis (ndisgen succeeds but the module causes a panic when it is 
loaded).

However today I was able to locate an alternate driver for the card on one 
of the "secondhand" Windows driver websites. It's an NDIS 5.1 driver that 
works with my hardware under Windows XP, but it doesn't seem terribly 
modern (it comes with its own utility for setting the wireless settings).

Under FreeBSD, ndisgen produced a module without any problem, and this one 
_doesn't_ case a panic when loaded. And it only sometimes causes a panic 
when trying to configure the interface (possibly just a race condition at 
boot).

I'm now able to configure the interface and see it associate on both ends. 
When I attempt to get a DHCP lease, the DHCP server sees the request and 
sends an offer but the tablet never receives it for some reason. So it 
seems I can send (on Layer 2 at least) but not receive. Layer 3 doesn't 
work in either direction, presumably because the tablet never gets any ARP 
replies.

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar situations and/or 
ideas for workarounds or troubleshooting strategies (or even vague 
theories). The files I'm using are netvnpci.inf and 
pcifvnet.sys--a "FastVNET PCI 11M Network Adapter driver" from ATMEL.

I'm more than happy to provide additional info if needed.

Thanks,

JN