Thanks for the reply.
Luckily we found another identical laptop where I work and we swapped the WiFi cards. Turns out it was just a bad card.
The problem of course is that the board wasn't "dead"; XP could see and talk to the card just fine. It was something else downsteam from the PCI interface that would pick up the radio signals.
We have a new card on order.
Thanks for your help!
S