Okay, I’ve reinstalled Vista, shrunk the drive again, reinstalled the Sierra 881u driver and then stopped. I figured I’d need some help this time so I did a search and came up with some decent instructions for removing some of the kludge from the installed software base. For some reason the article (a post) looks fine in Firefox on XP and rotten on the laptop running Vista. I have no answers, but here’s the article…
Laptops: How to Setup Toshiba Satellite L45-S7409 Notebook Computer
Mine isn’t an S7409 so it’s not quite the same as far as I can tell, but following most of the instructions in the post sped this box up quite a bit thank you.
Now I can search in earnest for a way to get the air card up in Linux, then the Vista side won’t matter.
Aloha!