I know exactly what you mean. I ended up turning the whole lot off. Didn't pay good money for a firewall to have to put up with Microsofts's half-baked effort.
If you don't want to install SP2 (understandable) try to stop XP from managing the wireless network and use the tools that came with the card wireless card. They should have been installed when you loaded the drivers.
let me know if have any success.
Ian