I very much agree with the main subject of this thread. With the help of MultiB and reading this board, I built a a very stable and fast machine (i7 2600k clocked to 4GHz based on a Z68X-UD3H-B3 in a lovely white H2 classic box -very sweet) but I could not for the life of me get the wireless to work. I literally spent 3x as much time fiddling with the box of old USB wireless adapters (two of which I actually had working in Snow Leopard in the past) as I did building my system!
I even tried to buy a cheap broadcom mini-pci board and fitting it to a pci-e adapter (a la the "real airport card" threads), but ended up having to send the adapter back as the little fiddly antenna connector things arrived pre-broken from Amazon.
Then I had the wireless bridge idea, and went to Microcenter to buy literally the cheapest thing that could act as a wireless bridge *out of the box* (I did not want to reflash a new router with dd-wrt - while I have done this in the past, I am completely fed up with fiddling for the time being).
I bought this for $20 -->
http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0345063
[I went with this particular one b/c it's a tiny little portable router that can be powered through a USB cable...maybe useful when travelling]
I set it up on an old Windoze laptop, connected it to my new hackintosh with ethernet, and voila, I had fast, fast internet. Note that Tenda refers to the mode I used as "Client + AP" mode...
I think there are several pluses to the approach of using a wireless bridge (or "Client + AP" as the case may be):
1. It is easy to enable Airport on ethernet connected devices and I don't think there should be any real compatibility issues, at least on the side you install the bridge solution (several links including this one give you the one line terminal command you need:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/16/enable-a ... rted-macs/).
I have a genuine mac laptop that I share with my wife, and have been easily been able to use airdrop to move files between my desktop and the laptop.
2. An ethernet connection is less likely to be disrupted by upgrades than a USB wifi solution (I learned this the hard way, as my previous USB adapter worked with Snow but not in Lion).
3. If you need an external antenna, many of the wireless AP type solutions will allow you to add these...
I can think of other pluses, but the main thing is that it works, and finishes off a rather nice build.
Anyway, just my 0.02 after wasting literally hours and hours trying to get a different solution to work...Wish I'd thought of it (or read this thread!) sooner.
-jasmeer