ipw2100 firmware problem on bootup

Recently my wireless connection stopped working. I found a way to manually fix the problem but am hoping somehow knows of a better solution. My story follows.

So my wireless connection stopped working one day when I powered on my laptop. Upon issueing the command 'iwconfig' I noticed the interface eth2 was no longer being displayed. So I looked in the bootup messages with dmesg and found this:

ipw2100: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Driver, 0.56
ipw2100: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:01:04.0[A] -> GSI 4 (level, low) -> IRQ 4
ipw2100: 0000:01:04.0: Detected at mem: 0xFE8FD000-0xFE8FDFFF -> e03d3000, irq: 4
eth1: Using hotplug firmware load.
ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[00e01800030ac969]
eth1: Firmware 'ipw2100-1.3.fw' not available or load failed.
eth1: ipw2100_get_firmware failed: -2
eth1: Failed to power on the adapter.
eth1: Failed to start the firmware.

I thought that's weird, I wonder why it would fail all of a sudden, nothing had changed except regular apt-get update stuff. So experimenting I tried 'modprobe -r ipw2100' to remove the module and then 'modprobe ipw2100' to reinstall it. Success!! But still everytime I boot up the firmware fails to load and I have to perform the same modprobe remove and install commands manually. Any ideas?