Wireless doesn't work using ndiswrapper for broadcom 4318 + wpa + feisty

Before I start: this all worked in Dapper... it didn't work in Edgy but I didn't need Edgy at the time but now I do need Feisty but I cannot use it!
I have an Asus A6km with the BCM4318 chipset
I install ubuntu/kubuntu/xubuntu (tried all 3)
After install in command line I do following:

rmmod bcm43xx # This driver doesn't support 802.11g but didn't work anyway with WPA
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf (from driver cdrom)
ndiswrapper -m
ndiswrapper -l
# This shows that bcmwl5 : driver installed and device (14e4:4318) is present
modprobe ndiswrapper
nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist # add blacklist bcm43xx
nano /etc/modules # add ndiswrapper

after doing this network-manager (gnome or kde) identifies the wireless and offers my network to connect to
I click to connect and am asked to enter the password. i enter the ascii wpa key or generate the psk using wpa_passphrase either way once i confirm the network-manager tries to connect but doesn't get further than about 28% and then stops after about a minute unconnected.

I've tried manually editing /etc/network/interfaces and manually specifying the wpa settings including trying wpa driver wext
i've followed forum advice (install latest ndiswrapper - suggests bug with ndiswrapper in repositories and adding ENABLE=0 to /etc/default/wpasupplicant) nothing works.

I've tried removing all references to network devices but lo in /etc/network/interfaces. I feel I've tried everything this past month but with no luck!

This should work out the box like it did for Dapper (install .deb files, follow ndiswrapper instructions, modprobe/rmmod and then use network-manager) I did try the latest PCLOS livecd to see if all distros are like this and PCLOS worked fine, I gave it the windows driver and it worked straight away, didn't even have to open a terminal!)