Well not completely. My wireless still does not work but I've rebuilt the kernel a couple of times and they boot just fine.
After getting on irc and following the instructions the gurus gave me carefully, installing the etch kernel on my system didn't fix the wireless problem on my box. I made sure the latest firmware was installed in /lib/firmware.
So... now after tarballing up my data, its too large to copy to another linux box so I finally tracked down some linux tools to burn it onto dvd (dvd+rw-tools package), there are loads others out there and had problems with other ones but so far so good with this one.
Then I'll proceed to do a fresh new install of Debian on my laptop and hope I don't descend deeper into another hole :-(