Proxim wireless card worked once, but won't now??

[Don W. Jenkins]

I have a system with a Celeron 2.4 Gig, 512M of memory, dual booting 
with Windows 2000 Server when I'm lucky ( I have been receiving some 
very kind help on this, but I am now almost positive my problem is a bad 
second HD), and a Proxim Orinoco wireless PCI Network adapter.  The 
system finds this just fine and identifies it as ath0, because it is 
based on the atheros chip, and Ubuntu nicely installs the firmware that 
is necessary to make these cards run and these are included at bootup.  
When I first tried Ubuntu, I was able somehow through doing some of the 
fiddling from the archives, removing "lp" from /etc/modules, trying 
different boot parameters, and just "ifdown" and "ifup" to wake ath0 up, 
and I'm not sure how, but for a while it got working fine.  Now that I 
seem to have figured out my dual boot problems and go back to reinstall 
Ubuntu, I cannot get the card to wake up in Ubuntu, or at least to stay 
awake.  If I use the networking tool and click "Enable" it will put a 
check mark in the box next to ath0 briefly, but just as quickly it goes 
away.  What doesn't seem to be happening is it doesn't seem to find the 
router (or vice versa) and get an address.  Mepis Linux enables ath0 
with just a click and it has an address and is running.  (There are 
other issues with Mepis making it less than usable.)  SuSE takes a 
couple of more clicks but has little trouble either.  I mention this 
because all three distros install and load the same firmware modules for 
this particular card/chip, so I'm pretty certain Ubuntu will do it if I 
hold my mouth right.  Also because I had it working once.  Before I get 
another Linux dedicated drive and settle on who gets installed there 
finally, I'd like to figure this little issue out, because there are 
some good reasons for using Ubuntu in my view, besides the neat color 
combo on the splash screen.  I find browns more soothing than blues or 
whatever. 

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know. 

Thanks,
Don J.