G'day;

Before I start I should say I am quite the linux newbie, everything I have done here comes from google searches and my understanding of the results. Of course everything I do here could be completely wrong so if you notice something out of the ordinary PLEASE let me know, I will try to learn from all advice. For the benefit of those who don't know AP stands for Access Point, or wireless router. On with the show...

I have been trying for the last 4+ hours to get my wifi card back online with no luck. I have a Linksys WPC11 Ver.4 PCMCIA card which has a rtl8180 chipset inside. I started with the XP drivers and ndiswrapper but Kismet doesn't work with this setup (if I understand correctly from the docs) so I had to resort to compiling the drivers from the rtl8180-sa2400 site on sourceforge which worked great and let me list ap's and connect just fine. However for some reason now I cannot get an address via dhcp. I can scan with
which returns the AP's local to me, including mine "SMC", but cannot connect with
This *used* to work fine and would get the card out of monitor mode (which it was set into by kismet) and would connect via dhcp. Now it just times out and can't get an address or any DHCPACK response, I'm wondering if there's something other than iwpriv, iwconfig, and ifconfig I should be checking or if i'm typing the wrong commands, or if it's the driver or what... Kismet still loads up and scans just fine, and 'iwlist wlan0 scan' still returns AP's but there is no connecting to my AP. Any help would be *greatly* appreciated.

ok I have no idea how I got this to work, since I believe I tried this all before but it works now.
I checked 'iwconfig wlan0' which returned a bunch of info including essid=""SMC"" which is weird since I used the command line
# iwconfig wlan0 essid SMC
but then in /etc/network/interfaces I see wireless_essid "SMC" so maybe it's that ifconfig is setting it to "SMC" which is wrong because it doesn't have quotes. Then I tried to ifconfig wlan0 up which failed and started spitting back at me:
So I did what any self respecting newbie would do, I panicked. I pulled the card out and tried to reinsert it, bing bang boom the computer crashed. On reboot it detected the card just fine, I made sure /etc/network/interfaces wireless_essid "SMC" was commented out and did 'ifconfig wlan0 up; ifup wlan0' and it works now... kill me, please.
I see this simular questions have been asked here and other places with no real answers so who knows, but I did try to reboot and see if that helped before and it didn't, so maybe it needed to crash to work right, for some odd reason. Anyways, hope this might help someone. If there's a pro around here that can make sense of what happened it might help a lot of people, and I will keep track of this thread and upload any information you may want if it will help.

Regards.