The distro:
Mandrake 10.1 Official.

The box:
Dell Inspiron 1100.

The card:
2Wire (802.11b, Orinoco chipset).

The problem:
I cannot get Linux to recognize the card.

The symptoms:
Initially the card was brought up properly during startup (but only following warm-boot); following cold-boots, neither of the card's lights flashed [at the PCMCIA and hardware-detection steps] and I couldn't manage to bring it up from the console after booting. So it only worked from a cold boot.

Now, after a couple months of the above behavior, I can't bring the card up at all, regardless of the boot type.

Failed efforts:
ifconfig, ifup and GUI network setup methods all seem to do nothing. Activating all of the network related services didn't seem to do anything either. I read that forcing no-apic might help, but it didn't. There is no sign of anything PCMCIA in the output of lspcidrake.

This card on this laptop with this distro were a functional combination prior to my last install (a couple months ago), so hardware incompatibility can be ruled out.

Any pointers would be great.