Intermittent wireless

[dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

Ok, I thought I had this but maybe not.  Got a Netgear MA401 wireless 
pcmcia card that used to work fine on my thinkpad with mandrake 8.

Now I've got it recognized and setup as an orinoco/prism2 based card and 
it works (the fact that I'm ssh'd into my other machine from my laptop 
proves it :)).  However it doesnt seem to work consistently.  What I mean 
by that is if I'm downloading something it'll just hang, and then suddenly 
I'll have a bunch of "no route to host" and ifconfig will show me that I'm 
throwing errors like mad.  But i do an ifdown and ifup, and I'm 
back...temporarily.

This shouldn't have anything to do with the strength of the wireless 
signal, as it happens when I'm not even moving.

Suggestions?  What's it mean when it works, but not well?  Is the 
orinoco/prism driver not the best one?  I dont have a full kernel source 
tree loaded so I'm leery of anything that starts out with building a new 
module...;)

Duane