Also, from 'dhclient eth'1 I get"

Hmmm mine never seems to grab the IP like yours. It just tries a few times then quits. What does your /sbin/dhclient-script for wireless look like? Mine says I don't have one.

Mine used to say that as well, but after I installed the kwifimanager, it didnt anymore. Make sure you do the 'dhclient wlan0' at the '/' level. Have you been doing that?

Sounds about write that a third party app would generate the wifi config, only problem is I use GNOME / Would you be able to post the config? Or do you know of something like kwifimanager for GNOME? Problem here is I don't even have QT installed, much less KDE-libs.

Yikes, that might be a problem. What kind of card are you using? I dont use the ndiswrapper, so I dont know much about it, other than as finegan said, it can be somewhat buggy and weird.

I looked for the /sbin config, and its the same as it was the first time I looked at it when it said I didnt have one, so I have no clue on that one

As far as a wireless manager for Gnome, I dont know, because I dont use it.

I'm using a Broadcom integrated chipset. It's worked before, on Gentoo. Seems the only thing getting in my way here is the way Fedora handles wireless/networking devices. One major kink here is that when I do iwlist scan, two devices come up, and the one has an address of 00:00:00:00:00. How does iwlist scan work? I only have one wireless router in the room, and it's the only one nearby, so it shouldn't be a confliction with another one. Bug in ndiswrapper perhaps?

Perhaps. You could try www.prism54.org and see if they have a driver for your chipset.

AFAIK, iwlist listens for access points using your wireless card. If its picking up two, does that mean someone close to you might have one? Either that, or you could have another wireless device that is in As-Hoc mode. Just a thought.

Well considering my dorm is primarily all dumb football players I think it's safe to assume none of them have a wireless router, and this second AP always has identical attributes (if I disable encryption they both have disabled encryption, etc.) with the exception of this messed up AP address.

I actually did manage to get the Prism drivers installed on Gentoo and that built some configs that allowed ndiswrapper to work better, but no luck as of yet getting those drivers to work on Fedora.

What kind of router/AP do you have? That is extremely weird Have you thought about updating your firmware?

I don't have the precise configuration or situation that you have, but I have gone through this wireless setup in a couple of different configurations. My ethernet card is eth0 and my lan is wlan0, so here is what I have to go through to get everything working after booting. (And this assumes the drivers are properly installed and the network device is setup to use dhcp.)

ifdown eth0
ifdown wlan0
ifup wlan0

As far as I can tell, if the eth0 card is active it interferes in some way with the wireless card dhcp. So, I shut it off. I shut off wlan0 so that it will pick up new IP/DNS server, etc. when I restart it with ifup.

Netgear wireless router, don't remember the model number offhand, itsa weird one. New router though, can't see why the firmware would need upgrading.

I'll give this a whirl again later today when I have a chance, but iirc I always had eth0 down when I tried. I'll fill ya in later today

I have 2 Netgear routers (home and school, Home is 54g, school is 11b) and both needed firmware upgrades right out of the box to work properly just FYI. I had nothing but constant trouble keeping a connection with my Centrino notebook (on Windoze) with the 54g, until I updated the firmware. From then on, its worked perfectly.

Interesting, when I had the connection working in Gentoo it would drop randomly. How can I update the firmware? Never done that before.

You need to find out which router you have first of all. Then head to the netgear site and look for a router firmware upgrade, if there is one. They should have it listed for your router. Once you've downloaded that, log into your router, however you choose to do so, and then upload the image that you just downloaded. Once its uploaded, the router reboots itself, and you should be ready to go.

Got the firmware upgraded, it actually fixed the two AP problem for a brief moment, but on reboot it happened again / so I can set it up, it gets an IP now but it won't set the ESSID and that seems to be the problem here. My guess is (again) it's confused about the two APs. Any ideas?

Thanks for the the help btw, you guys have been a huuuuge help!