Well now, it seems the linuxquestions.org community has left me to die!!!!
welll... i found out my prob anyways. so for, any of you who have problems with this, read along.
if your output of iwconfig gives an output of 11Mbps on the bit rate, you can probably chunk it up a bit.
Code:
iwconfig wlan0 rate 54
booom! headshot.
thats how i fixed it... i love answering my own questions.