If your trouble doesn't settle down, you could consider downgrading your kernel to a 2.6 one subsequent to the one used in 13.37, with support for the wireless card, as Thenktor mentioned; or try a slimmer DE. The less of it there is, the less there is to go wrong. For a complete contrast to KDE, you might like the Ratpoison edition. My Salix Ratpoison 13.37 is working flawlessly with the new kernel.

Unfortunately there isn't a live version

With any of the other editions, though, you could just boot Live into runlevel 3 (there's a boot parameter for this), install those kernel packages which you a lready have, recompile the nvidia module, and give it a whirl. Xfce is very nice. The other two are more minimalist.
Having said that, if my hardware could take KDE, I probably wouldn't want to relinquish it.