Unique Question

So I'm running fedora 9 and my laptop chugs. I'll post my specs but basically what I'm after is something that will run smoothly on my machine and have good auto-hardware detection. Any suggestion would be very appreciated.

Intel Celeron M @ 1.4ghz
256mb RAM

I don't think you'll need anything else other then that. I've got decent onboard video. Nothing special though, 64mb.

Debian is super lite, and easy to start with. though i have not tried wireless w/ it in some time. So i would be curious about difficulty of that before you dive in.

also are you using the beryl effects or is fedora just slow on its own, because standard should be able to run on that machine

Zenwalk will do great.
As pointed out by the previous poster, the problem most likely isn't related to the distribution itself, a dmesg would be useful in case their's faulty hardware and the previous OS didn't detect it. (very often the case when you let the system decide what hardware you want to make use of)

Try installing another WM/DE, there is a wide varity of WM that aims to be minimalistic.
Fluxbox --- very minimalistic, command line based
fvwm-crystal --- feature-richer than Fluxbox, CLI based
Xfce --- feature richer than fvwm-crystal, GUI based

My personal all time favorite (although i liked the kde 3.4.x series) is xfce and afterstep (it's dead nowdays, though).