Comment 1 for bug 55308

Can confirm this behaviour on my hp nx6110 with ubuntu-dapper. For me it looks like network-manager is managing the whole communication with the wireless driver (therefore you will probably use n-m), but ignoring the special key and the bios-defaults (obviously ndiswrapper does not care about n-m).

Using bcm43xx, the light can be turned off if in gnome-network-manager (I think knetwork-manager will have a similar option) wireles networks are disabled. The problem for me is, that neither g-n-m remembers last state nor I can figure out a keycode-event for the wireless key, that could be used to turn it off via n-m.

I don't think this is a bug, rather a wishlist issue, but decide for yourself.