I've been having a lot of trouble lately with Debian's initscripts and the ipw2200 driver. The initscripts appear to be detecting and loading the module before the filesystems have been mounted, leading to the module load to fail because the firmware loader can't access /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware. After unloading the reloading the module, everything works again. This is extremely inconvenient as it means my system can no longer boot up unattended...

Messing with the startup order (i.e. ensuring that /etc/init.d/mountall.sh is called before /etc/init.d/discover or /etc/init.d/networking) doesn't seem to work correctly - I'm using initscripts 2.86 and ipw2200 1.0.8. Can anyone make any suggestions?

Because your /usr is on another partition?

Then put it in /lib/firmware (/etc/hotplug/firmware.agent defines the location where firmware can be put)
I hope you don't have a partition for each directory

I have partitions for /boot, /home, /opt, /tmp, /usr, and /var. I'll try moving the firmware around.