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Wireless stopped working after kernel upgrade

I've wasted most of my Saturday trying to get wireless to work with
the latest kernel on my 64-bit Sid box.  I have an Atheros ar5001x
card, and I've been using an older 2.6.22 kernel with madwifi drivers
for the past two years.  I'm rather conservative in upgrading my
kernel, precisely because of issues like I've had today, but I found
need for 2.6.30-1.

As madwifi is gone from Debian testing and unstable, I decided to
switch to the ath5K drivers included in the latest kernel.  I followed
the instructions here: http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k, with the
exception that I use wicd to manage my network, and as such I had no
need to amend my interfaces file.

After rebooting and a little fiddling, the ath5k driver came up, and
wicd found my wireless network.  I can't however connect to it.  It
tries to connect, usually timing out while getting a valid
authentication, but sometimes it manages to validate the WEP key and
attempts to obtain an IP address but then times out doing that.

I've tried every suggestion that I could find through Google and this
list, and none of them worked.  The driver is loading correctly, and
my card is being detected.  It just won't connect.  I even switched
back to the madwifi drivers at one point, installing from source, and
it still wouldn't connect to the router.  (That plus the signal
strength was horrible in madwifi.)

The card was working properly this morning, so it's doubtful the
problem is in the hardware.  I've also tried switching to WAP and
turning off security altogether, but that made no difference.

One odd thing that occurs is that udev keeps renaming wlan0 to ath0.
The ath5k instructions state to change all references of ath0 to
wlan0, but that results in "Device not found" errors.

The output from iwconfig is:

ingrid:/home/autumn# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth1      no wireless extensions.

eth3      no wireless extensions.

wmaster0  no wireless extensions.

ath0      IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"JohnWayne"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.417 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
          Tx-Power=27 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

pan0      no wireless extensions.


dmesg shows this every time I attempt to connect to the wireless router:

[ 2707.953219] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 1
[ 2708.152034] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 2
[ 2708.352026] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 3
[ 2708.552034] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f timed out
[ 2713.502701] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz)
[ 2714.666870] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz)
[ 2714.683331] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 1
[ 2715.114532] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz)
[ 2715.120196] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 2
[ 2715.320031] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 3
[ 2715.520029] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f timed out


ifconfig gives this result:

ingrid:/home/autumn# ifconfig
ath0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:02:42:ac:d1
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:bf:3a:2f:47
          inet addr:192.168.1.4  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::250:bfff:fe3a:2f47/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1470 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1940 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:588211 (574.4 KiB)  TX bytes:416006 (406.2 KiB)
          Interrupt:19 Base address:0x6000

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:12328 (12.0 KiB)  TX bytes:12328 (12.0 KiB)

wmaster0  Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr
00-18-02-42-AC-D1-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          UP RUNNING  MTU:0  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)


My etc/network/interfaces file has no references to ath0 due to my use of wicd.

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp


I've tried uninstalling wicd and configuring by hand, but it gave no
different results either.  I also installed the 2.6.26 kernel from
unstable and tried the official Debian madwifi packages with it.
Still nothing.

I've reached the end of what I know to do.  Using a wired connection
is not a solution, as the computer and the router are on opposite
sides of the house.  Any suggestions on what to try?

Thanks,
Autumn
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