In the end I went for Elive - it was smooth to load from USB stick (elive version of unetbootin is on their site) and I just liked the look of it - even though it's not free
But still no wifi! So, before I found this forum I got some really helpful info from:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/118555
that enabled me as a Linux "noob" to determine what wifi hardware I had ( Realtek 8192), advised me that I needed to use ndiswrapper, and gave me a link to the correct win driver download.
After unzipping on my win PC I transferred the driver files to my netbook. All I had to do then was boot up the netbook in "Reparation" mode - select wifi - and since Elive has ndiswrapper already installed - just run it and browse to the inf file. Elive did the rest - and on reboot I now had a wlan0 showing and all the local wifi networks from which I could select mine and get going.
With no experience of Linux but wanting to run it on my netbook it was disconcerting to find that there was such a problem with wifi. I tried Ubuntu NBE 10.10 - and disliked it - it was slow - found my my wifi but wouldn't log on ( I have wpa2 and MAC filters enabled) - and I hated the side bar. Linux Mint 10.10 with KDE was promising and I ran the release candidate for a while. It logged on first time around 90%, occasionally needing a second attempt, but would eventually lock up - showing a network connection but not allowing any further browser or net activity. Unfortunately the full release was no better and also seemed to have a problem with updating. Mandriva - i just gave up trying to create a USB loader on my Win 7 PC
Really glad I have found this forum - wish I had found it sooner! Hopefully, there may be something in my post that helps save a little time for anyone else following this well trodden path from Windows to Linux.