Bug#592943: still no network with 2.6.38 from squeeze-backports

[Oliver Sander <sander@mi.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi!
I just tried the 2.6.38 kernel in squeeze-backports, to no avail.

From http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/orinoco I learned that
this is a known issue, and that I should set the wpa_supplicant 
parameter ap_scan to 2.
However I can only do that if I stop using networkmanager, because 
networkmanager
ignores the wpa_supplicant conf files.

So I guess I could start trying out alternatives to networkmanager, but I
don't really like the idea.  First, nm is the default and I would expect
it to just work.  Secondly the machine in question is not mine, and I'd
rather not fool around with it too much.  I am stuck:  is this a kernel bug?
A nm bug?  Will someone with more skills than me fix this properly sometime
in the future?  Can I help?

Thanks for your time,
Oliver