Are the problems I have with my other internal card - the Intel 2200BG
- related to my particular card, those Intel cards or Mini PCI cards
in general?
Your problems shouldn't be specific to all miniPCI cards, but there are a couple of potential gotchas
One is that IBM cleverly locked down the bios on some Thinkpads to only work with specific card VendorID's. Official reasoning was that they could only promise FCC compliance with tested cards, Unofficial reasoning was that Wifi was an expensive option on some Thinkpads and the cards wholesale to enable it were 15 quid.
There are bios patches to disable it or extend the list of supported VendorID's, the R31 may not be affected but google first as I know for instance the R40 was.
Another one is that some miniPCI cards are hybrids which contain say Wireless and the Modem or Wireless and Ethernet. I don't think the R31 is affected but check the card only has antenna connections going to it and not a separate multipin connector.
Finally there were two standards for managing card power status (for Wireless power off switches) in hardware. One is rare and I have only seen in really nasty stuff, there is a workaround which requires removing a track to the miniPCI edge connector. I haven't seen this issue since a horrible Medion laptop in the early days of integrated Wifi so I doubt that will be a problem here.