Hey, hopefully this will get the attention of someone more experienced than me ..

Recently installed Slackware 12 on my laptop (huge, non-SMP kernel (I already recompiled it, though, just minor changes since I didn't have too much time) - I wanted to get my wireless working (I managed to do it under 10.1 and 11 _many_ times, but it never went smooth. Well, at least in the end it worked .. ). I downloaded MadWifi sources (0.3.9.1) and did everything just like the "FirstUserHowTo" on madwifi.org told me (the "FirstUser" part sounds ironic, I'm doing this for, like, the 10th time?). And boom, I can scan for APs, connect to them - in other words: works like a charm.

Then I rebooted and it stopped working. All the modules seem to be loaded, though I had to manually load wlan_wep ( .. got loaded automatically right after install .. ).

And it's dead - I can't scan, can't connect, can't do anything else .. and I'm not even getting any errors ( .. which would at least be some hint).

So .. I uninstalled MadWifi completely, installed and set it up from scratch again .. and guess what? It's working. As long as I don't reboot..

Anyone got any idea what the heaven is going on in here?

If you had to load wlan_wep explicitly, that suggests you might not have done a "depmod -a" after installing Madwifi.

Does your wireless device have 2 possible kernel modules. If the other one is loaded as well, the one you want would be dead. Look in /etc/modprobe.conf and /etc/modprobe.d/ and see if there are install lines for a competing device driver.

Why are you using wep? It only takes an average of one minute for someone to crack it.