The HP Laptop with no antenna.. strikes back!

So, yesterday the Dlink Rangebooster N 650 PC Card wireless board arrived for the HP ZE4200 I've had in over xmas and new year.. I installed it, it worked.. no drama. the 256MB of ram that came in the same delivery also slotted in nicely.

And then.. dramatic music please...

the machine hard locks with the wireless card installed if the machine is on battery power, it's completely and utterly stable, with horses and straw and such when running on the mains, pull the power cord and it'll hard lock halfway through booting into Windows... or whilst it's in windows, or just because I took a slightly deep breath

I'm still throwing a battery of 'what the hell man' tests at the machine to try and suss out what's going on... suggestions are welcomed.

No really, anyone? anyone? Bueller?


Update:
Turning off power management, and setting the machine to 'always on' makes precisely NO difference whatsoever, pull the cord whilst the machine is running and you've got maybe three minutes to get to lockville and close the shutters.

Update 2:
At the behest of someone on a forum, who shall remain nameless to protect the indecent (I may have misheard that phrase.), I disabled the Dlink in software, powered down, pulled the mains, and powered up.

It got all the way into windows and is quite happy to sit there being laptop'y
Which leaves me with two possible angles of investigation.

1) for whatever reason, the machine cannot power the wireless card properly without mains power, with the driver unloaded the card isn't powered up and thus isn't drawing (at least not significantly)

2) something in the software messes up the systems power management.

Back to the investigation wheel!

Update 3:
I rang the client and explained what was going on, since they wanted the machine for today.

AND THEY DON'T CARE!

They are apparently completely content to have a laptop that can't even be carried around with a working internet link, I'm flabbergasted.


Oh, and thanks to having the machine in a different physical location, and thus different lighting, I can now see that the LCD backlight flickers in time with harddisk accesses. good grief what a pile of crap the damned thing is.

Oh, there is...
One more thing...

Anyone ever seen PC2300 ram before? the stock Infineon ram it has installed has SPD timings for 142Mhz? what the?

Well that's just bizarre.