Ti Book with airport and snow airport base + airport update 3.4.3=50% drop in download speed and decreased range.

I upgraded from Airport 3.4.1 driver on my TiBook 800 MHz to airport driver 3.4.3.
I checked out the usual websites for the speed of posting and found it to be slower than my previous driver. To make sure it was not a question of "caching", I "went" back and forth to same sites but the speed of page download was slower. I downloaded a file from internet and found that speed has dropped by 50%; I had a point of reference because I downloaded same file just before upgrading airport driver. I moved my Tibook to a room which previously had adequate reception. But not after upgrade; signal went from 3 bars to none...

I decided to revert to previous version of the Airport Driver=> 3.4.1. That required manual removal of the 3.4.3 extensions and receipt form the "receipts folder", followed by reinstallation of the 3.4.1 driver. The download speeds returned to normal thou I have had no occasion yet to test range. Oddly system profiler still listed extensions as 3.4.3, even thou direct examination of extensions in folder show 3.4.1 versions.

Conclusion: it appears that the 802.11b Snow Airport Base and the 802.11b Airport card combination do not benefit from the upgrade, quite the contrary, performance seems to suffer. Based on some reports, it appears that combination of an Airport Extreme and Standard Airport do improve after upgrade. I wonder if others with "pure" 802.11b airport systems noticed problems.