flakey wireless - bug on Hoary?

[David]

Dell Inspiron 4000, Netgear WGT624v2 AP, Netgear WG511T pcmcia card, 
atheros chipset, using WEP 64bit key and static IP.

>From a fresh install, I get a connection which seems to be stable. Then I 
rebooted and can't get the connection back. 

All  the settings in the network panel look OK but the MAC address shown 
by iwconfig is FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF and the flashing lights indicate no 
connection.
ifconfig gives the right ip address etc and route shows the right gateway 
(192.168.0.1) on ath0

No amount of doing /etc/init.d/networking restart, or 
deactivating/activating using the network panel seems to make a 
difference.

HOWEVER: If I manually create an ethernet connection with the network 
panel, deactivate wireless, activate ethernet, deactivate ethernet, then 
activate wireless.. i get my wireless back! I've been able to replicate 
this now several times.

This is getting to be a showstopper for using Ubuntu. Works fine for 
WinME dual booted on the same machine :(

regards...

David.

PS: i've tried apt-get update, apt-get upgrade but that made no 
difference.