Nose to nose with the wall.

So I'm back to where I was long ago, just about ready to give up on the whole mess. Why doesn't ndiswrapper recognize the presence of the card? dmesg indicates that the system is recognizing the insertion of the card, but the OS doesn't know what to do about it. The Slackware 12.0 HAL isn't doing anything with the card, probably because there is nothing set up in the rc.whatever files. But I've no idea which file to edit or how to change it. Grr. None of this should be so difficult or obscure. I understand completely why the driver files themselves are so absurdly difficult to write, but I'm not trying to do anything so complicated.