Excellent post strider. I had wifi problems with a laptop I bought recently that had the atheros wifi, and Method 2 got me up and running. I got another laptop for christmas and the wifi doesn't completely kill the LiveCD at boot so I decided to gift the other one to my dad. The new one boots the LiveCD at least and has some decent BIOS options but still no wifi. It's a broadcom wifi If I remember correctly. I'll have to see how your method 1 fares regardless as I'd like to finally have a way to attempt to get my dad to use linux as he isn't very pleased with Microsoft's direction and gets frustrated some times and says he'll have to try linux sometime.
Here's the info that helped me out concerning method 2 for anyone interested.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/287244