Cool, I'm glad to hear of your progress!
Yes, I think ndiswrapper will be your only option with Wary if there is no native driver for your adapter. Someone more knowledgeable about the OS would have to respond to help with that. I have no idea which drivers were included (and left out) in Wary 5.5.
As far as the dropouts, are you close to the signal source? Proximity and removing as many obstructions as possible might improve playback. Maybe you tried this already.
Do you have Lucid puppy installed on the hard drive? If not, that may be why you have to reconfigure the wifi connection every session.
Perhaps watchdog can help you obtain the needed files for ndiswrapper, as he previously mentioned.
Regards...