Im using Mandrake 9.1 and have installed a driver for my SMC 2662w wireless USB adapter as well as the wireless tools, but I am unable to connect to my AP/router with or without WEP enabled on the AP. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also, when i do "iwlist eth0 ap" my router's MAC address doesn't appear in the list of reachable AP's, although several with MAC addresses of all 0's do appear

Could you post the output of iwconfig <your device> and also ifconfig <your device>, as well as checking lsmod to make sure the module(s) for it are loaded. Also, check the end of your /var/log/messages for errors specific to this device, it's modules and any attempts the system has made to configure it.

While I don't own your specific device I can tell you not all wireless devices support all the various options that the wireless tools provide, I have several that support only a subset of those options and yet work fine.

Of course, I would assume you've checked your router's settings for things like mac filtering, essid name and essid broadcasting.

Ok, first off in my efforts to get this working I tried switching to Redhat 9 and am using a different driver now, its site is here http://at76c503a.berlios.de/. Anyway this is the output of iwconfig and ifconfig like you asked for:

[root@localhost /]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions

wlan0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID: my correct essid is here Nickname:"okuwlan"
Mode:Managed Channel:10 Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate: 11Mb/s
RTS thr=1536 B Fragment thr=1536 B
Encryption key: my WEP key Encryption mode: open Power Management: off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig-wlan0 is not listed, just lo appears

thanks for your help so far

looks like the wireless setup is good, other than the lack of Access Point. If "ifconfig -a" returns a device other than lo, and this is the only network device enabled on your box, then try using this: ifconfig dev xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where "dev" represents the device name returned from ifconfig -a and the x's represent a valid class c network address appropriate to your access point, eg: your access point's ip is 192.168.2.1, so you'd use something like 192.168.2.10. At that point if all goes well a plain ole "ifconfig" should return both your device and lo. At that point you may need to reissue your iwconfig cmds, especially essid. Either way, then try to ping your access point: "ping 192.168.2.1" using the example ip address from above. If that works, then try adding to the routing table: "route add default gw 192.168.2.1" where the ip address is that of your router. At that point you should be able to ping named sites like cnet.com etc. If all this works it simply verifies that your driver and device are working with your access point, which would be nice. To automate all this on boot and after a resume from suspend, I suspect you'll need to look in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, although I can't be sure since I'm not running RH here. RH may also provide gui tools for this, which might work also.

Ok, I did "ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.102 up" then when I do an ifconfig eth0 shows up, but ping 192.168.2.1 (my router) returns destination host unreachable and iwconfig still doesnt list an ap. Based on this and the fact that the link light on my adapter isn't on I assume that its not finding the ap Thx for ur help thus far.

I'm confused here as to which device your wireless card is. Your iwconfig post shows it as wlan0, but you're now working with device eth0, do you have 2 network interfaces in this machine? ie: one wired and one wireless? To clear this up post the output of ifconfig -a (don't forget the -a). I suspect this is going to show 3 devices lo, eth0 and wlan0. The one you want to work with would be wlan0.

Worry about the confusion, there is only one adapter, but I have tried reinstalling Linux several times to get this to work and on some of the earlier installations I was using eth0, but it is now wlan0