hello,
i have 3 issues which may or may not be hardware / driver issues.

#1.
dual booting with xp sv pk 3 / debian lenny : 8gb ntfs/20gb ntfs(storage)/debian residing on ext3. from debian even when using ntfs tools i am unable to mount ntfs partitions. I was able to mount at one time; however, after booting to xp it says permissions denied. i have applied a password to the guest account in xp as well as drive compression. i can access ntfs on remote drives via samba and userass input. mount also works over network. i just cant access local partitions. permission issue witrh xp?

#2
RaLink 2500 based Netopia wirelss usb key: I have used this usb key in slackware 12.2 ( older kernel version than lenny and slackware 13.0) and it has worked fine; however, upon using debian lenny, slackware 13.0 the ralink drops from a 54Mb/s throughput to may be a 20-30Kb/s thropughput. I even tried running the older legacy drivers from the ralink site to see if that was the issue. No change. However, I may not have the machine pointing to the ri9ght driver. I thought that upon installing the deb pkg via synaptic that Lenny would patch the kernel mod with the new driver. also, i am using wicd for management. I have seen some issues on how the ralink driver maybe handeling bits incorrectly; unfortunatley, that would be getting way out of my depth. could really use some help.

3#
Dlink WUA2340 : i used to deb front end to ndiswrapper and cant get rid of an old driver now. The wua2340 has never worked for me in linkux via ndiswrapper. The issue is that after running ndiswrapper -r <driver name> i get an "not found does not exist'error. I didnt stop to think about the way the front end was configuring things b4 i ran the com line method and manualy listed ndiswrapper via -m/-ma. did i screw up. what would i run to fin all instances of the driver? find | grep -w <driver>? anyways, I find it hard to believe that the dlink will not work as it is such a wide spread card. lsusb and ndiswrapper -l show the device. modprobe ndiswrapper does nothing to kick the card on.

to sum it up: the ralink i thkn is an issue with the newer kernel as it will work but slows down with any thing other than slackware 12.2 which was running 2.6. something old (lol). was wondering who else has had this issue. the dlink should work as others have said they got it working with the ndiswrapper and win drivers. i can post dmesg results if need be. thanks for your help in advance.
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Answer to #1: Most likely your problems is because of disk compression. Try using ntfs-3g, it should work.

For questions #2 and #3, all I can suggest as professional in wireless business is get a Atheros based product and all of your worries are over.

a firmware change addressed the issue with the card. the 3g solved my fs issue