@jsalisbury

well, a little story first - 

- I disabled/removed the STA driver then 
- over the weekend a belkin N300 usb wifi dongle plugged in and tried; 
- I fiddled with dkms and tried to get the realtek module loaded; net results same as with the internal broadcom (the realtek module was created and installed with no errors); brief conn'n  established , the dongle light was coming on -  as with broadcom then out of the blue disconnected and dongle light disappeared.   
- then in additional drivers the belkin/realtek driver removed too.
- used ndiswrapper and xp drivers; net result even worse than  the first two - as soon as the command connect issued the desktop disappeared , dumped to a console with enable trace last line and a hard pc lock.

so I decided for a new oneiric install with the N300 usb wifi present. alernate CD install went ok. after first boot 

sudo ifconfig
[sudo] password for peter: 
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 1c:75:08:de:da:a0  
          inet6 addr: fe80::1e75:8ff:fede:daa0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2309 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:1
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:142092 (142.0 KB)  TX bytes:5470 (5.4 KB)
          Interrupt:41 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr ec:55:f9:24:47:97  
          inet addr:192.168.2.16  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::ee55:f9ff:fe24:4797/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:124694 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:66189 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:183797851 (183.7 MB)  TX bytes:5757259 (5.7 MB)

sudo iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"BELL864"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.427 GHz  Access Point: 00:26:50:B3:59:69   
          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=-148 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:132   Missed beacon:0

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

# This file was automatically generated by the /lib/udev/write_net_rules
# program, run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.
#
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single
# line, and change only the value of the NAME= key.

# PCI device 0x1969:0x2062 (atl1c)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="1c:75:08:de:da:a0", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

# PCI device 0x14e4:0x4727 (brcmsmac)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="ec:55:f9:24:47:97", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="wlan*", NAME="wlan0"

big diff from first post #4.  no eth1 - now wlan0; no wl but (from lsmod)

brcmsmac              631693  0 
....
brcmutil               17837  1 brcmsmac
......
mac80211              310872  1 brcmsmac
......
cfg80211              199587  2 brcmsmac,mac80211
....... 
crc_ccitt              12667  1 brcmsmac

conclusion : broadcom internal wifi works flawless; solid good steady conn'n. why this time and not on first install ? v hard for me to tell. I used the same install media, reformatted the same size part sda7 same swap - totally puzzled.

thanks to all. I will not try any other kernels - if it ain't broken don't fix it. thank you Joseph.