OK, an awful lot of reading later, and what you are describing is a known bug for the Xpress 200 RC410 (not that it helps you).
Some people have got the thing working and some haven't, it seems as dependent upon the hardware configuration of the rest of the machine as anything else. One thing I would recommend is updating your kernel from kernel 2.6.33.7-pclos6.bfs to kernel 2.6.38.8-pclos3.bfs.
Where people have been successful they have either rolled there own kernels or used the latest versions. A kernel update (if there is one) is always a good starting point with hardware problems, quite often the latest kernel will automagically fix your problems for you simply due to the better hardware support it offers.
thanks andy. LOL, how did you come to find that out??
unfortunately, i'm not experienced enough to roll my own kernel yet, but the system is up to date, at least as far as updating it via synaptic goes. pclos is a rolling distro correct? even so, my about pclos (gnome) says the release is 2010.10. does that always stay the same and other things get updated, or is that just because that was the installed release, and it really is updated somewhere?
how can i update the kernel if synaptic still says there are no updates, after reload>mark all updates? also, i was reading recently that some older kernels actually work better on older hardware, because things get cleaned out of the kernel to prevent bloat. i guess it's not so old a laptop as to be completely obsolete, but would a new kernel really be having any better hardware support for such an old computer(over 5 years), than the ones that have been around for a few years? sorry if i'm getting slightly off topic here.