Reopening, there’s more to this than I thought.

I thought 3.2.0-14 brought with it a regression, but it turns out it’s now the -pae kernels that freeze during boot as I initially described. The thing is, I could’ve sworn I already ruled this out and also that I did most of yesterday’s successful boots with 3.2.0-13-pae, since that was the topmost and default in the Grub menu. So I’m not yet ruling out some funky hardware fault, but for now I’ll update the title to reflect how it presently seems: the wistron_btns problem lies with -pae. Non-pae kernels all the way back to 3.2.0-12 now boot fine.

I’m currently running memtest on the laptop just to be sure, although I’ve done it multiple times before with no issues.