[MLB-WIRELESS] Horrible pain...

[fenn_b at smktech.com.au]

Hi All,

I am finally conceding (temporary) defeat with a wireless related
problem I am having. I recently received my beautiful Ricoh PCMCIA->PCI
bridge as purchased in the bulk buy (thanks Paul!) and popped it in a
machine with a lucent orinoco silver. To my delight, it worked perfectly
and all was good in the world.

I then put it in a second machine, which I have a specific application
for. Unfortunately, there due to it's nature, it must be running windows
(win 98 to be precise). It too worked perfectly there as well, until I
decided to install a "Windows Update" (it was a fresh install of 98SE),
after which the orinoco WOULD NOT WORK no matter what I tried.

I'm by no means a newbie when it comes to the caveats and peculiarities
of the windows' Plug'n'pray system, but this one has me beat.

Before I get into the major rant, quick system setup summary:

PC
 - Intel P133
 - Old Intel Triton FX chipset (concerned about this)
 - 64MB ram
 - Win98SE with Orinoco-wrecking-update
 - Ricoh (RL5C475?) PCMCIA->PCI bridge
 - Genuine Orinoco Silver (dunno about firmware)

Basically, what happens is that when the machine boots (or I insert the
card), the drivers all detect and install, the card comes up in the
cardbus screen, but it makes a low your-card-isn't-working "BEEEP", as
opposed to the normal Card-OK beep it makes.

Further investigation shows that the orinoco is sharing the I/O address
with the cardbus adapter (which I thought was OK). I basically stuffed
around with it for aaaages, until I found that if I changed the I/O
address of the cardbus adapter (once booted), it would re-allocate
resources on the spot, the card would come up and it would work
perfectly. However, as soon as I reboot, the orinoco will jump on to
whatever resource I have allocated the cardbus adapter and fail to work
again.

So far I have:
 - Fooled with IRQ's/IO addresses till the cows come home (they haven't
yet)
 - Adjusted PCI IRQ steering settings
 - Reinstalled orinoco driver completely (it's running the latest)
 - Reinstalled ricoh driver completely
 - Found an alternate ricoh driver and tried that
 - Tried taking out multiple other devices
 - Tried manually changing I/O or IRQ values via the registry (device
manager won't let you change it on the orinoco)
 - Fooled with the EnableIRQSharing key in the orinico hardware registry
entry

Basically, there seems to be no way that I can find to stop the orinoco
jumping to the same I/O address as the cardbus adapter, and hence making
itself completely and utterly useless. In addition to this, the BIOS on
the motherboard appears to be so old it is pre-flashable and I therefore
can't do a flash upgrade (I'm 95% sure).

Just wondering whether anyone else has experienced anything similar.

Any suggestions are most welcome (and thanks in advance),

	Fenn.


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