Alright, a bit of background: I'm running debian sid, 2.6.6 kernel. Newest everything with apt-get update / upgrade.

When I bring wlan0 (my wireless adapter) up with ifup wlan0, I get no errors. ndiswrapper lists "present" next to the driver (lsbcmnds). However, I cannot get an essid to "stick" with this card.

I execute the command:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "myessid"

and see confirmation of that command in iwevent in another xterm. I also see no events after it in iwevent, so no daemon is changing things back.

Then I run iwconfig once more, and see that my ESSID is blank.

Also, my security mode defaults to restricted, even though I have this line in my interfaces file:

wireless_mode Managed

...so yeah. I'm kinda frustrated.

With some cards, particularly those using Broadcom chipsets, you need your mode to be Auto for ESSID changes to stick. I'm not sure if it is a bug in ndiswrapper or just the facts of life when trying to make Windows drivers work under linux.

No luck. After turning off encryption and setting the mode to auto, the essid still doesn't stick. The mode does change to auto, however. My AP mac address seems bogus; FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF .. I can find the stuff on iwlist wlan0 -scanning. I may try some other drivers, even though this one is shown as "present" by ndiswrapper.

AP address of all FFs means that it's not connecting. Could be driver problem. Could also be some error in order of loading - I've got a cardbus wireless card and my system default order of loading was network first and then pcmcia - so ndiswrapper reports card present but nothing works.

Could try rmmod ndiswrapper then insmod ndiswrapper and then iwconfig command to see if that makes a difference.

Nope, no difference. I tried using the linuxant driver loader, and it says it cannot find a device that goes with the driver I supplied (even though the driver I supplied was from the linksys website for my specific card)...
Next thing I'm gonna try is bcmwl5a.sys or whatever that alternative is.