It looks like you're making some progress, and learning the value of checking 
the Linux Hardware Database or looking for drivers BEFORE you buy hardware.

You didn't mention your distribution or version, which could make a big 
difference.  A lot of progress has been made in the last year toward getting 
the wireless laptop cards to load (and unload) smoothly.  

One of the problems is that these cards are actually PCI cards, and the 
original PCMCIA hotplug scripts didn't handle them correctly.  Mandrake 9 had 
definite problems with the scripts not matching up with each other, and with 
detected hardware triggering only part of the loading process.

I run an ACX100 card (SMC2435W) and have to compile the driver for each kernel 
update, but SuSE installs the kernel sources for me with each update.  In 
order to successfully stop the card when the laptop goes into "sleep" mode, I 
shut down /etc/init.d/network, then pcmcia, then hotplug.  Starting these in 
revers order will bring the card back up when the laptop comes out of 
"sleep".

These are all just scripts, and if I were to dig into what scripts SuSE is 
running when "sleep" mode is triggered, I could probably fix them to do 
what's needed in the right order rather than having to do it manually, but 
I've been too lazy to bother.

You may find that if you look into the above scripts you can find something 
that helps.  You may also need to check with iwconfig to make sure that you 
are setting the right mode on the card so that it is compatible with your 
WAP.  While Windows often uses successful defaults, Linux requires a little 
more active configuration.  

For SuSE, the wireless parameters are set 
in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia.  I think Mandrake puts it 
in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.