I am currently setting up my laptop to use slackware, i had previously used Debian for about a year and hopped around a few other distros prior to that. The issue that i always run into with slackware is that it always has problems with my wireless card unlike the other distros. The problem is that the KDE GUI doesn't see any of my network interfaces but when i pull up the terminal and use iwconfig/ifconfig they are right there. I currently have a wireless network set up to use just a plain password. Additionally when i goto the network settings in KDE i get a XML parse error.

Hello tseruzhy0 and welcome to LQ,

I use to setup my wireless network on the commandline. Edit your /etc/wpa_supplicant and insert the settings for your network, i.e. name of the network and the passphrase. Then edit your /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and edit the settings for wlan0, select to use wpa_supplicant.
Afterwards you may start your wlan0 with "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 wlan0_up".

Be sure to read the man pages for wpa_supplicant and rc.inet1.

Markus

For a simpler route, check out wicd in the extra/ folder on the disc. It is an extremely effecient and easy to use program to connect to networks.