i've installed ndiswrapper and used the wizard to configure it and my wireless card but it doesnt work
in the console i typed: mdiswrapper -l and it said the driver was present and the hardware was detected.
at boot it says something about no hardware detected for wlan0.
i tried to modprobe ndiswrapper but it fails
i tried iwconfig and wlan0 wasnt on the list
i managed to configure ndiswrapper on debian from the console and it worked there.
anyone have any ideas?

P.S debian sucks about the only thing i did get working was the wireless

Which version of mandriva? Also, did you install ndiswrapper from an rpm or did you compile it from source?
Reason for the second question, I installed ndiswrapper from the rpm in mdk10.1 and it refused to work just like you described. I uninstalled it and downloaded the most recent ndiwrapper tarball and installed from the source and all went well. The reason is the rpm was made for a differnet kernel than the one I was using; ndiswrapper must be compiled with the kernel you are using.

i'm using Mandriva 10.2 and the ndiswrapper that came as a package with that. I might try downloading and compiling it but that sounds hard. Other posts have said that ndiswrapper doesnt work when installed from source.
I might give it a try.

EDIT: That worked Thanks