Hey AJ, thanks for the response:
<<installing this and building it with your kernel is probably the most reliable thing to do. But if you've grabbed your own from sourceforge and it loads fine (any dmesg errors?) we could move on to seeing if can see any networks with iwlist or iwconfig or if it registers as an interface at all with ifconfig.>>

Since my original post, I've made some progress. I had an older wifi router that I set up with security off and I can pretty much connect to that at will now, with WEP off. Now working through what I need to do to make it work with WEP on.

One unsettling bit is that I'm winging it and basically doing what I need to connect by trial and error. There's a wireless.opts file in /etc/pcmcia which I'm thinking doesn't need to be set; the other wireless.opts file I've read about is in /etc/rc.d but my installation wasn't created with that dir.

What seems to work (and this may seem lame, using GUI tools instead of just iwconfig) is setting up the basic eth1 device in the Debian networking tool and then using the KDE wifi tool to set options, with the two matching by network SSID name. Not sure if there's a better/smarter way. Depending on settings, I have seen the eth1 wifi card come up autoatically or brought it up with ifconfig, set some options with iwconfig.

<<The currrent issues with the ipw2100/2200 drivers are:
Ubunutu has old versions of the drivers that have issues with WPA.>>

Right now, I'm just working on the WEP issue, I'll look at the better security there once I have it going for awhile.

<<The ipw2100/2200 drivers can't set the centrino into 'promiscuous' mode, so really cool wardriving apps like Kismet don't work. This is unresolved AFAIK.>>

That would be a cool thing to mess around with!