Comment 18 for bug 816145

This affects me too.

When I woke up this morning, heard my laptop fan running because of a dialog box that needed attention, which in itself to me is a bug.

Even though I had my ethernet cable plugged into the laptop, it was still trying to reconnect to a wifi network in the house, and there is no telling how long this dialog box had been up, causing my cpu to run hotter.

So I pressed the physical wifi button on my laptop (which I never use, because I've always perceived it as not working in Ubuntu), as an attempt to turn off the wifi card temporarily, until I was actually away from my wired connection at home.

Then I did today's system updates (via Synaptic), which seemed to include a new kernel (?), and shut off the laptop, since it needed to be rebooted for the update, and I was leaving for work anyway.

Once at work, I started the laptop again, and now I have the "wireless is disabled by a hardware switch" issue.

Ubuntu 11.04 amd64 is the only OS on my machine, can't do anything with Windows. Don't know if this situation is related to running the updates this morning, or solely from pressing the physical wifi button on my Compaq Presario CQ60-215DX laptop.

sudo rfkill unblock all doesn't fix anything
sudo rrmod hp_wmi doesn't seem to fix anything either, though the module is now unloaded
forcing my grub2 menu and booting with an older kernel doesn't seem to do anything either