I compiled ndiswrapper 0.7 and installed the proper driver for ndiswrapper under Mandrake 10, but the lights don't even come on for my PCMCIA wireless card.

Any suggestions on what I should do or where I should turn for more help? I'm a complete Linux newb, although I'm really hoping to learn a lot of stuff from these bad experiences.

You can try installing an RPM which allready contains pre-compiled binaries -> Ndiswrapper @ Rpmfind.net.

Download the file & do rpm -Uvh Filename.rpm.

To see if it's properly installed do rpm -qa | grep -i ndis.

Then check out this page Getting Your WireLess NIC Working with the NDIS Wrapper Device Driver