...is what i'm suffering from.

running slack9/2.4.21
Linksys PCMCIA card WPC11 v3
linksys 802.11 router

-my pcmcia card services are up and running
-cardctl shows the correct card, while[and i'm not sure if this matters] Bromax OEM 11mbps 802.11b WLAN Card(prism3)
-when i do an lsmod, prism2 shows up.

i try to start with wlan-ng and does nothing.
in fact, it tells me that wlan0 doesn't exist.

i don''t use WEP and slack wireless tools tells me my system has encryption enabled.

i've been hacking away at this for 4 days now, and it's driving me crazy...i've looked at all of the tutorials i could find through google and nothing any of them tell me to do work. i should also mention that by now i've probably got everything all screwed up. maybe someone can give me a quick install[haha, like that's gonna happen]...as you can tell i'm awfully optimistic ....but there's alot i still dont know about linux, i'm finding out, so maybe i'm missing something simple. thanks in advance for any help.

I know what you mean. :-)
Have you been over the wlan-ng mailing lists? You can search they're archive from here http://lists.linux-wlan.com/ They saved my sanity on occasion. One thing is I am pretty sure that wlan is not compatible with wireless tools. Another is you should see prism2_cs in lsmod. (maybe thats what you meant) Thats the pcmcia card driver for prism2 and 3. If you don't see that then you should do the ./configure and recompile on the wlan-ng drivers. Good luck.

I have a Netgear card that uses the Prism2.5 chipset, and wasn't able to get the wlan-ng driver working properly. Instead I downloaded and compiled the hostap driver, and it works really well! Once I figured out how to set my wireless system up, I submitted a howto in the "answers" forum. Check out the howto... it may help.