Faulty wireless card?

[Andy Green]

Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On 09/10/2007, Charles Curley <charlescurley at charlescurley.com> wrote:
>> I have ipw2200 wireless Ethernet. Sometimes the binary blob looses its
>> marbles. I've found it useful to stop NetworkManager (NM), remove the
>> blob, re-insert it, then start NM up again.
>>
>> service NetworkManager stop ; service NetworkManagerDispatcher stop
>> rmmod ipw2200 ; modprobe ipw2200
>> service NetworkManager start ; service NetworkManagerDispatcher start
> 
> Indeed - had been trying that (but with the ipw3945 drivers) to no
> avail. Just now, I tried it once more, and I can now get a statically
> configured network connection to work with the card. Shutting that off
> and starting NetworkManager however doesn't work - NM fails to see any
> wireless networks. Very odd indeed. Intermittent and unreproducible
> behaviour is the worst.

I've seen it act like that recently, after waking this laptop from sleep
(I managed to go 30 days until last week just sleeping it and not
rebooting... lovely).  I found you can coax it to connect (after the
stop ; modprobe -r ; modprobe; sleep 2s ; start rigmarole) so long as it
says "no wireless networks found" or similar by filling in the details
on "Connect to Other Wireless Network" with your AP SSID and keys.

-Andy