Sony vaio pcg-v505bx saga...

Well, lspci gave me a hint. Harris Semiconductor (now Intersil?) with an id of 3872, and with this info, google found some stuff.

One place is saying to patch the orinoco_pci driver and another, the prism2 driver (prism2sta.c)

I will give this a whirl as soon as I can get the time.

Meanwhile, on the first go round, Sony did not tell me what wireless chipset was in the machine, but I have asked again specifically in a relpy. We'll see where we get with that.