OSX Lion: Macbook + external display = wifi problems

With Leopard, to use the external monitor as the main display you had to put the mac to sleep by closing the lid and with the power adapter on. Then you had to waken it with an external keyboard. Because of the problems that most people seemed to encounter with wifi in clamshell mode, it was then necessary to open the macbook again. This was possible as the external monitor would remain as the main display.

Problem: with Lion, when you close the macbook, the display automatically changes over to the external display. This is nice, however, the wifi problem has not been fixed, so if you wish to then get the wifi up to speed again and open the laptop, the display is automatically changed back to the laptop. THere is no way to prevent this, so it seems. So although the switching process is better, the wifi situation has just got worse!!

In clamshell mode my connection drops to about 500Kbps to 1Mbps, when the lid opens it rockets straight back up to roughly 10Mb.

Does anyone know how to use an external monitor as the main display for a macbook, while allowing the macbook lid to remain open when using LION. Though it would be even better if Apple could fix the wifi problem in clamshell in the first place.

Cheers

Ovate