Comment 6 for bug 539794

OK, have done some more testing - things are more complicated than I thought. Unfortunately, my hopes that the upstream kernels has fixed my wireless has been dashed...

I've tested the following kernels:
2.6.31-02063112-generic_2.6.31-02063112_i386 from the mainline
2.6.32-16 - latest for lucid
2.6.33-020633-generic_2.6.33-020633_i386 from the mainline
2.6.34-999-generic_2.6.34-999.201003151003_i386 from the current mainline

the following are observations for each kernel:
2.6.31 - wireless was perfect - same wireless broadband speed as RJ45 connection (245 kBs)
2.6.32 - wireless was intermittent & slow - wireless broadband speed was max 100kBs - RJ45 was max 245 kBs). phy0 -> rt2500pci_set_device_state constantly outputted to kernel log.
2.6.33 - wireless was intermittent & slow - wireless broadband speed was max 100kBs - RJ45 was max 245 kBs). no errors outputted to kernel log
2.6.34 - wireless was intermittent & slow - wireless broadband speed was max 100kBs - RJ45 was max 245 kBs). phy0 -> rt2500pci_set_device_state constantly outputted to kernel log.

The only conclusion i can think of is that 2.6.32 broke the rt2500pci driver and that this has carried through to all the upstream kernels.