Comment 32 for bug 188621

It appears I hadn't posted my earlier findings on this bug report either.

At least in my case, ssb was part of the initrd by default due to a desire for eth0 to be up immediately (presumably for a network boot, if desired). This requires b44 to be in the initrd which in turn requires ssb to be loaded. This all happens regardless of whether /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf has BOOT=local instead of BOOT=nfs. It can be prevented by changing the DEVICE field to `lo' however. Doing this and then blacklisting b44, b43 and ssb allowed me to cleanly load ndiswrapper during boot. It has the consequence of requiring me to manually load b44 when I need to bring up my wired interface, but that's easily done in /etc/network/interfaces.