Asus Aetheros Suckage

So for the most part I've been pretty happy with the laptop we bought a couple years ago for my wife, its an Asus Aspire 5050. Nothing crazy, but its form factor is decent and as long as you don't try to upgrade to vista it handles just fine.

Anyway, I did a fresh install of XP professional after the machine was slowing down from install rot. After I installed SP2 at some point the system would really start to choke a lot, I ran Process Explorer (thank you microsoft!) and found the CPU was getting slayed by Hardware Interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls. After some googling for Asus and Aetheros (the company that makes the wireless component in the notebook), I ran into some Eee users who were having the same problem. They really tried everything (bios updates, hotfixes, etc).

Somehow someone figured out that the wireless component in conjunction with some other mystery part of SP2 will go nuts and always try to constantly renegotiate with the Wireless Access Point what channel they should be talking on. The fix is simple, I just went into my AP and changed the wifi channel to always be 9 instead of "auto".

At least I'm done and I've got documentation in my blog in case this crap happens again.

Why can't my stuff just work?