AE1000 / rt3572sta driver not letting me set essid/ap
 

I recently got an AE1000 USB Wireless adapter... In researching how to get it to work under Linux, I came across some helpful information on http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=244215 that advised on how to download the ralink ra3572sta driver, which I did, and managed to successfully compile and install (for sake of reference, I'm using Slackware 13 with the 2.6.33-4 x86_64 kernel)

Everything seems to be working well, right up until I try to connect to a wireless network:

root@darkstar:~# ifconfig ra0
ra0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 68:7f:c7:47:b6:31
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0MiB) TX bytes:0 (0.0MiB)
root@darkstar:~# iwconfig ra0
ra0 Ralink STA
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0
root@darkstar:~# ifconfig ra0 up; iwlist ra0 scan
ra0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 4A:40:03:8B:35:C3
Protocol:802.11b/g
ESSID:"mynetwork"
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality:52/100 Signal level:-69dBm Noise level:-92dBm
Encryption key:off
Bit Rates:54 Mb/s
root@darkstar:~# iwconfig ra0 essid "mynetwork" commit
Error for wireless request "Commit changes" (8B00) :
SET failed on device ra0 : Operation not supported.
root@darkstar:~# iwpriv ra0 set ssid="mynetwork"
Interface doesn't accept private ioctl...
set (8BE2): Invalid argument

Suffice it to say I tried several other combinations of ra0 up and down, etc. My best luck came from editing the /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat file as suggested by the readme for the ralink driver, which lets me successfully "set" the essid for the adapter, but it doesn't associate the access point or receive any data, etc... Basically the only function that seems to be working is scanning for APs. Apparently this driver works under other distros like Fedora/Ubuntu that use NetworkManager, but I can't figure out why its not working for Slackware. The thought occurred to me to try the driver under 32bit distro and see if theres any difference, but wondered if anyone here had any experience with this adapter or could offer some advice to point me in the right direction on this one?

Did you try wicd from the extra repo?