I've got a Linksys WPC11 Version 3 PCMCIA Wireless Ethernet card running
on RH9 using the orinoco_cs driver. I'm having no problem connecting to
my network initially, but every couple of minutes or so, I lose the
connection. I also lose it immediately when I start to download files, either via edonkey, bittorrent or ftp. The redhat network configuration tool still shows the device
as active, but iwconfig shows:

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
Mode:Managed Channel:-160 Tx-Power=15 dBm
RTS thr:off

This is incredibly annoying, and if anyone has any idea why it happens,
I'd appreciate the help.

Don't have a solution to your problem, but I am having similar problems when I connect to my Linksys wireless access point using my laptop and an Orinoco Gold PCMCIA wireless card. I can surf fine, and I can ssh into my server to read and write email. But when I start transfering files, the connection drops, and I have to 'cardctl reset' to get the connection back. Of course, if the transfer is still going on, the connection will drop again shortly thereafter, and I have to reset again, etc, etc, etc.

I thought it might have something to do with the PCMCIA card being too hot, so I put the machine on standby for the night and then tried again in the morning. Same thing happened. Now I am thinking through other ways that I could possibly trouble shoot this thing. My daughter, who is using a WUSB11 v2.8 on a Win98SE machine occasionally has outages also, although I don't know if they are during file transfers. She is able to unplug the USB adapter and then plug it back in again, and it works. (Functionally equivalent, I would think, to my card reset.)

You don't mention if you're using a router or not, but many of the consumer-grade routers are very prone to losing their minds with BitTorrent and the like.

I also had similar problems (my iwconfig looked differently than yours - the frequency would change to 200GHz [!!] and the CPU utilization would max) with a particular combination of orinoco_cs and Prism card that was fixed by using the most recent driver: 0.13e.