After a little bit of trouble, I've finally got wireless on the laptop to work, drivers, modules and firmware sorted out. 'ifconfig' can bring the interface up perfectly fine.

However, the wireless interface refuses to associate with any access point. Using wpa_supplicant to connect to my router appears at first glance to work, but running 'iwconfig wlan0' before and after shows no difference at all - it's as if I'd never done anything at all.

I've made sure I'm passing the right password through wpa_passphrase, then running the command 'wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf' to attempt to connect but to no avail. I've no idea what issues wpa_supplicant may be running into because it just doesn't tell me.

Anyone shed a little light here?

Have a look in /var/log/messages, and even dmesg, for any messages regarding wpa_supplicant. On a side note, have you tried connecting to any access points without encryption, just to rule that out?

Whether it's odd or not, I don't seem to have any /var/log/messages, and since all access points in these parts are WPA1/2, I can't test on an unsecured for now.
The only possibility I can see in dmesg are two lines that don't seem to give any insight into the issue either:
...which seems less than helpful

Well first of all, have a look here, since I haven't used gentoo in so long - http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wirel...WPA_supplicant

What wireless device do you have?

Right, gone through that and... no difference really. Most of it I've either done or needed to try, and what I needed to try didn't do any better.

lspci reports the wireless device as follows:

Is it possible the wireless card is hardware turned off?
Your laptop should have a little switch or fn+something combination. Have you tried that?

There is no such switch for this wireless device. In addition, running 'rfkill list all' confirms that the device is neither hard or soft blocked.

Is this module loaded?

You might also give the broadcom-sta driver a shot if you continue to have trouble with it. Just remember to remove the in-kernel b43 module if you do so.

That module apparently doesn't exist on my system. Will have a hunt around and see whether that's something I've missed earlier on.
Would rather use the b43 driver if I can though, it's worked before and under other distros on it, usually with better results... but if it becomes necessary, I'll have to switch over.