Hi @lamb
I do share your frustration here, but reading your post I realised that you are actually working on the BW16 module directly and that could be the problem here, bcos we are all using a dev board for testing, power managment is already handle by onboard circuit. From the information you provide, there is a sudden power surge(~400mA) when WLAN is trying to connect to nearby strong AP signal, this is unsual but I have tested it on the BW16 dev boards and all seems working fine.
If you really wanna take a look at the WLAN library, you may have to sign an NDA to access more source code and technical documents, please read the information below,