I have a fix for this... at least for mine.
It would appear that at boot it tries to start the networking and pcmcia service twice and causes the orinoco card to flake out.

Here is how I get my orinoco gold card to start working on my knoppix hdd install.
if you do
ps aux
you will see that there is /sbin/pump running and it is trying to get an ip address for the wireless card.
type in as root
killall pump
then
/etc/init.d/networking stop
then
/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart
then run
netcardconfig
this will then setup your ip address and then kick over to your wireless settings.

This procedure worked for me. Let me know if it worked for you.