I just upgrgaded from slackware to mandrake 10.1 on my compaq armada m700 laptop. In slackware, everything worked fine, and same with mandrake up until a few days ago. For some reason, after the comp. came out of standby for the first time, the PCMCIA slots stopped working completely. When I plug in either of my wireless network cards, no lights come on. Under the 'services' menu of the control panel, the service called PCMCIA is running, but when I stop it and start it again, I get the error: cardmgr [5262] No sockets found! This is odd, because the wireless network was working fine with mandrake earlier. Please help!

In my experience you may have to unload and reload PCMCIA related modules after labtop comes back from supend mode. Those modules are ds, yenta_socket, pcmcia_core.

You might want to take a look here: http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7548
My wireless card would not work either and I added in the /etc/modprobe.preload file.

In the link you sited, there is a subsequent post that correctly points out that this should not be done via the modprobe preload, but rather by the cardmanager service.

It may well be that his cardmgr service is not starting up automatically and needs to be re-enabled.

Ok, I'm very new to linux and would appreciate any insight you can give me. Why should it not be done in modprobe.preload but rather by the cardmanager service? I have it working in modprobe.preload is this bad? Will it cause some unwanted effects?

No, in and off itself the modprobe preload will not blow anything up.

However the cardmanager service not only does the same thing but is responsible for probing for installed pcmcia boards.

In turn this info is passed onto Kudzu permitting it to either prompt you or autoconfigure the card.

That means that you can remove the card, boot Linux and Linux adjusts accordingly. Conversely you can insert a card, boot Linux and Linux will configure the card.

Preloading the driver may cause Kudzu not to see things as something "new".