Comment 46 for bug 1023645

Andy, sorry to hear that.
I must admit that ubuntu is not the easiest of platforms, and there is so much jargon and assumed knowledge that it makes even simple problems difficult.
If it's just the ndiswrapper problem, you might want to have a look at my experience, described in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ndiswrapper/+bug/1132511

There is a new release of ndiswrapper (1.58) available at sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/)
I also found a copy on ubuntu's support site after I had already installedit.
It solves the problem that I was having in a couple of minutes. There's a copy of the tarball attached to the bug report, so you should be able to extract it and install it from there., or do your own search for a more current version.

Subsequently, my ubuntu kernel reverted to the 'currently supported' version (1.57 for ubuntu 12.10, which is what I am running), so I had to re-install. I've since updated my Synaptics package manager with a PPA (I forget what it stands for, but as you say, it's more unpronounceable stuff). It's supposed to tell the software installer not to overwrite v1.58 with v1.57. So far it's working, but if it were to revert back, I can re-install in a couple of minutes.

Go to the directory (folder) where you extract tarball and do
sudo make clean
sudo make
If there are no errors, then do
sudo make install
 and then
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

I have no idea why a solution that seems so straight forward (v1.58) and has been around for months, hasn't been incorporated into the basic distribution, but that's something that others can answer.

Jerry