Atheros abg / madwifi trouble

[Sven <sr12 duke edu>]

NetworkManager does not work well with my mini Atheros abg card. it can
associate ok, but then roughly every minute it looses the connection and
the card is scanning/cycling through all channels for about 10 secs or
so. during that time iwconfig gives "FF:...:FF" as the AP. it cycles
through the channels 3 times, and the associates with the original AP
again.

i'm using: 
* Fedora Core 3, kernel 2.6.10-1.753, up2date,
* CVS NetworkManager from 20050130,
* madwifi driver snapshot from 20050125,
* wireless tools 28pre4

card details: 
02:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212
802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Atheros Communications, Inc. Netgate 5354MP ARIES a
(108Mb turbo)/b/g MiniPCI Adapter
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 11
        Memory at 20010000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

any help with this issue is greatly appreciated. unless this problem is
fixed NetworkManager is pretty useless for me. 

thanks,

Sven