Seeing as how your post comes up in the google results, I thought I'd add how I fixed this. Make sure there is a swap partition bigger than 128MB on your card. I made a 512MB because I am using it as a (really slow) minecraft server. then, if you are running ubuntu...
#iwconfig eth0 essid your_id_here
#iwconfig eth0 key your_hex_key_here
#ifconfig eth0 down
#ifconfig eth0 up
#dhclient eth0