[Hampshire] Wireless network problem

I have a strange wireless problem which I hope somebody can help me with. I am
running Mepis 8 RC2 (which is based on Debian Lenny). I am using an Acer
laptop which has the Intel 2200BG wireless interface which is seen as eth0
and a Broadcom Nextreme ethernet interface which is seen as eth1.

Since installing mepis on this laptop the wireless has worked perfectly out of
the box but of late it has developed a problem.

If you let the screen saver run (I am running KDE 3.5.10) when you hit the
mouse or keyboard to bring the laptop out of the screen saver mode, you find
that the wireless network has stopped working (try pinging yahoo.com,
nothing). Now if I ifdown eth1 (the wired interface) the wireless will
suddenly come back to life. So it seems as though something is sending the
wireless to sleep when the screen saver kicks in which then allows eth1 to
become the dominant interface and when the screen saver stops won't allow
eth0 back on the the network.

What I would like is an option where I can turn eth1 off until I plug a cable
into it, I know I could blacklist the eth1 driver (which is t3) and then
modprobe it back in when I wanted to use the wired interface, any thoughts???

Tim