Wireless card suddenly stopped working -- is it dead?

[chombee]

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 510m running Dapper. The wireless card is
an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter, internal. I checked
and there is a linux driver for it, it would normally work out of the
box on ubuntu.

It was working fine when I setup Ubuntu on the laptop, back in the
Breezy days. It has since been upgraded to dapper, and the card was
still fine. Then all of a sudden the user brings the laptop to me and
tells me the Internet has completely stopped working, and sure enough,
it has.

The network monitor applet (not the new nm-applet, the old applet) is
looking at the loopback interface, lo, and refuses to look at anything
else. In Network settings the wireless card appears and can be
activated, deactivated etc., but no networks show up in the list of
networks. Even if I enter the network name manually it doesn't connect.
I also tried running dhclient from the terminal and got nothing. 

Strangely enough when I booted a Feisty livecd I got exactly the same
problem with the wireless card. Does this sound like the internal
wireless card has actually died? Iwconfig gives weird output, all 0's
and off's, which seems to suggest to me that the card is dead, but I
don't know. I tried various commands to power it back up but got
nowhere:

iwconfig
-> eth0 unassociated ESSID:"default" Nickname:"ipw2100"
Mode:Managed Channel=0 Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate=0 kb/s Tx-Power:off
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sudo iwconfig eth0 power on
sudo iwconfig eth0 txpower on
->SET failed on device eth0; Invalid argument.
sudo iwconfig eth0 txpower auto
-> SET failed on device eth0; Invalid argument.

etc.
Nothing seems to get anywhere.

Here are some more outputs:

lshw: http://pastebin.com/f3ea10d7f

iwconfig: http://pastebin.com/f7cb8c0a9

sudo dhclient eth0: http://pastebin.com/f24580559

The laptop was definitely in range of a DHCP wireless network named
"default" when I ran that command, because I'm able to connect to the
network fine using ra0. ra0 is an external wireless card I've attached
in order to make this bug report, it works fine, the problem internal
card is apparently eth0.

The card should be compatible, from the looks of this page

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ha...workCardsIntel

using the ipw2100 driver, and I notice from the iwconfig output that it
seems to be using that driver.

Oh, one more thing. When I first looked at the laptop the
linux-restricted-modules package was marked as broken. I used Synaptic
to fix it, then to install all the latest updates for dapper, then
rebooted, before running the tests in my first post. I noticed that
Synaptic installed new versions of linux-restricted-modules and the
linux kernel.

Here's the output of dmesg after I booted the laptop and messed around
with eth0 and ra0 for a while, doing the tests in my first post:

http://pastebin.com/f5454db24

eth0 is the internal card that isn't working. ra0 is an external I've
attached that works fine. I don't see eth0 anywhere in dmesg. Weird.
Should dmesg print out all info since I booted the laptop?

Any help with this? I've looked through the wireless man files, the
linux wireless lan howto, googled, asked on IRC, placed a question on
launchpad, but haven't learned anything.