Odd Wireless Issue

(woops - just realized I didn't put this in the laptop section - mods, feel free to move)

Hi, I'm new here as a poster. I've been lurking for a while, though. I've been using SuSE since 5.2, but find myself in the Windows world most of the day (I'm an MS SQL Server DBA).

So I finally got around to installing Linux on my Panasonic Toughbook CF-74. It's taken a few days, but I've got almost everything working correctly. The only thing that I haven't gotten up yet is the touchscreen - but it sees it as a joystick (and I saw the Fujitsu USB panel driver in YAST), so I think I'm on the right track. I had a few minor issues with the audio - but that was resolved by adding the media repository to YAST so I could update Alsa to 1.0.16. After that, everything was hunky dory for the most part.

I'm having an odd issue with my wireless, though. When I originally set the box up, I hadn't gone through the kernel update (said there wasn't any) and I managed to get wifi up and running by installing the NDISWrapper. But yesterday I realized that YAST was missing one of the repositories, so when I added that, it updated the kernel (forcing me to remove NDIS) and added all of the other updates.

Now, the Intel 3945 driver works fine, but the only way I can get the KNetworkManager to see it is if I physically flip the radio switch off/on. Until I do, the Network Manager doesn't even recognize a wireless adapter and YAST just displays a "cannot load kernel module" message for the wireless nic. As soon as I flip the switch, it comes alive and everything works great. Sure, it's a minor gripe, but it'd be nice not to have to flip the switch off/on everytime I power up my laptop.

Has anyone ever come across an issue like this before?