I spoke to the system administrator at school yesterday regarding my travails with the the crappy Broadcom card. He suggested that I try a few other distros and see if the builtin driver works on any of them. I had already tried Fedora Core and Ubuntu. I downloaded CentOS 4 and Mandriva one Live , While CentOS totally failed to detect the card Mandirva at least recognized that the card wouldn't work out of the box and asked me to provide the windows driver ( bcmwl5.sys) I downloading a copy of the file from http://sidulus.textdrive.com/-31/bcmwl5sys
but that didn't work either when I tried it with NDISwrapper the wizard asked me for the *.inf file which I downloaded from the HP site, It seemed that the installation went without a hitch but the WiFi gets activated only for a few seconds and goes offline. I am still stuck with a crappy card which doesn't work in Linux.
will post more in a few days....