I think you have a bad card or, less likely, pcmcia socket. I have the identical setup (Inspiron 7000 with WPC11) which works with both 3.3 and 3.4.

The only problems I had are regarding editing certain config files (see http://weblog.nohair.net/current/#000484 for this) and the fact that the connection breaks when kdm loads. Once I've logged into kde, I must run "ifup eth0" to restart the connection.