I have had many problems getting wpa to work on various distros on my Toshiba M55 Satellite and have eventually worked through them all and thought I had seen them all. Now I have a new one.

For other reaons, I had to reinstall Mandriva 2006, a distro that I had wpa mastered on, I thought. Now I have a new problem where when wpa tries to connect with any of the networks I have listed in wpa_supplicant.conf, it says "association request to the driver failed" and then goes to "authentication with 00:00:00:00:00:00 timed out." Well, the second message is of course not surprising but I am not sure what to do to fix the driver problem noted in the first message.

I have an atheros chipset, using madwifi, and everything seems recognized properly. iwconfig shows me the ath0 interface is there and lsmod shows the ath_pci module is loaded. Also, all is working in windows and in my mepis distro so the hardware seems to me fine.

It blows my mind that I would be having this problem installing a distro from the exact same media that has caused me no problems in the past, but I will gladly move past that confusion if I can just get some direction on how to start troubleshooting this.

TIA

Robert

Edit: oops, maybe I should have put this in the wireless networking sub forum. I am going to repost over there and if a moderator wants to delete this that would be fine.