Managed to get Belkin 54g card working with manual configuration using ndiswrapper.
Although SuSE 9.1 and YaST support a lot of wireless cards not ones based on this chipset.

Using Belkin 802.11g wireless router - ESSID broadcast disabled 128 bit WEP.

Toshiba Satellite 2450 Pentium 4 2.4GHz 256Mb memory onboard Realtek 8139 multiboot XP/SuSE 9.0/SuSE 9.1

SuSE 9.1 comes with ndiswrapper 0.6 which I had installed with YaST but I downloaded latest 0.8.tar.gz. Didn't need to uninstall 0.6 or make clean - but if you have ndiswrapper 0.4 or earlier you should.
Followed the install instructions that came with ndiswrapper.
Extracted to folder
copied all files from Belkin CDROM Driver folder to same folder (bcmwl5.sys bcm43xx.cat bcmwl5.inf)
make install
ndiswrapper -i /path/to/bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -l showed:
bcmwl5 present

iwconfig wlan0 essid "essid_name"
iwconfig wlan0 key <hexadecimalkey>

iwconfig now shows wlan0 with correct ESSID and Key but ifconfig shows no IP addresses

dhcpcd wlan0

gives error message - no config file but gets IP address

ifconfig wlan0 now shows IP addresses and everything works.

Now to make it stick!

Because this card is not guaranteed to be present in the machine which has onboard ethernet decided not to make it load on boot. Although it is hotpluggable, if the machine is booted without a cable in the onboard ethernet it gets network errors on boot up and won't hotplug. Once card set up and network working then it can be removed and reinserted and will hotplug. Good enough for what I need.

Used /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg.template as a template to create new /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0.
Key sections are:

STARTMODE='hotplug'
BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF='yes'
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE='yes'

WIRELESS_ESSID='your_ESSID'
WIRELESS_KEY=''
WIRELESS_AP=''
WIRELESS_AUTH_MODE=''
WIRELESS_BITRATE='auto'
WIRELESS_CHANNEL=''
WIRELESS_DEFAULT_KEY='0'
WIRELESS_FREQUENCY=''
WIRELESS_KEY_0='your_key'
WIRELESS_KEY_1=''
WIRELESS_KEY_2=''
WIRELESS_KEY_3=''
WIRELESS_KEY_LENGTH='128'
WIRELESS_MODE='Managed'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''
WIRELESS_POWER='yes'

everything else can be left as ''

On first boot run (as root):
iwconfig wlan0

This should show wlan0 details connecting to your router and obtaining IP address

ifconfig wlan0

This should show the normal stuff complete with IP addresses obtained by DHCP

route

Check that the default gateway is shown against wlan0

That's it!

Initial problems I had were to do with the default gateway not being set on wireless and even after manually adding default gateway (route add default gw 192.168.x.x wlan0) not being able to resolve DNS names because the nameserver wasn't being set up. Finally tracked it down to entries in ifcfg-wlan0.

Once up and running it does appear in YaST Network devices .. Network cards but DON'T use YaST to change anything!

can u tell me what exactly u added in your /etc/resolv.conf? What do u mean by AP?

I have:
nameserver 192.168.0.1

I know this is the router, because I already have a running network and it works with windoze and my other linux boxes (without wlan).

The green link liight is constantly flashing and the other light is off.

Also another question:

I downloaded:

rtl8180_linuxdrv_v15_rh90.zip

it has all the drivers for Red Hat 9.0, obviously. It even has 2 scripts:
wlanup
wlandown

When I do ./wlanup ap it tells me:
Warning: loading rtl8180_24x.o will taint the kernel: forced load

The only time I got, wht u had was when I used ./wlanup ap , but there are also other options:
Usage: ./wlanup {ap | infra | adhoc}

What are they for? I'm completely new to wlan, so plz help. Also, I would like to use encryption/passwd to have secure connections. Where is a good place to start other than google?