I'm glad the wireless is finally working! If you loaded a .inf-file with ndiswrapper, that means you made Linux load the Windows driver instead of using a native Linux driver. It seems like this solved your problems :-)

NetworkManager requires a system service in order to work; launch this system daemon before you try using NetworkManager again:

su -c "/etc/init.d/network-manager start"

As for the external harddrive, did you remember to install ntfs-3g? I'm not really sure why you're getting Access Denied errors, but since it's the second time we're having trouble with the automounting, I'm tempted to just create a static entry in /etc/fstab that explains once and for all how to mount your external harddrive ;-). Can you plug in the harddrive, and post the output of the following command:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/usb-*

There are two normal causes of audio problems. Install the package alsa-utils, and try running the command alsamixer in a terminal. If a volume control shows up, it means that your audio card is detected and probably just muted; in that case you can use the arrow keys to move between volume sliders (master, pcm, headphones, etc), and press the key "m" to mute/unmute and use up/down arrows to adjust the volume. If alsamixer fails, the problem is likely that the audio drivers aren't loaded yet.

OK, thanks so much for hanging in there with me.

[edit]
Another possible reason you're having problems with the audio, is that you're not in the audio group. Try giving yourself these rights the same way you gave yourself rights to control network devices:

su -c "usermod -G audio jim"