Comment 17 for bug 668234

The behavior in comments #16 was confirmed by several reboots.
However, afterwards I wanted to reenable wlan by unblacklisting acer-wmi (situation as in comment #12). But even several reboots and shutdowns did not bring wlan back (in Natty with your patched kernel). The "phy0: Wireless LAN" was always "Hard blocked: yes. ". Toggling hw-switch did not help.
Then I booted into Oneiric (acer-wmi blacklisted) with kernel 3.0.0-13 and there was no wlan again (it almost freaked me out ;-) ). Something was hardblocked all the time. Even an external USB-wlan-card, which helped me out in the past when the acer-wmi was annoying me, did not work anymore.
In the end a combination of loading/unloading acer-wmi and toggling the hw-switch did the trick. Since then, wlan works again, even in Natty with your patched kernel....

I don't know if anything of this is usefull to you, but I though providing some info should not hurt... ;-)

Let me know if you need any logs or a rerun of some procedures.