I have an Orinoco Classic Gold (B) card in a Dell Latitude cpxj650, as does a friend of mine. He has the same symptoms that Gnarvaja has, while mine boots up fine. From what I can see the problem lies in "Cardmgr", somewhere , because my last entry in the Cardmgr section is Cardmgr[131] +./sbin/pump -i eth0 >/dev/null, while he gets "+ operation Failed" then "Start cmd exited with status busy."

We both have wireless routers with different Essid names; he has WEP active, I do not. We both run Knoppix 3.7

I took my laptop ovet to his house , booted up and could not get on the network.
Running Iwconfig showed my Essid was blank .

I ran (as SU) "Iwconfig eth0 key xxxxxxxxxx" using his WEP key
I then ran "Iwconfig eth0 essid nnnnnnnnn with his router name
I finished with Pump -i eth0 and got a green light on my card, then signed onto google with Firefox
The point is, the WEP did not cause my cardmgr script to lock up.

My friend ran ( As SU)
pump -k
cardmgr

then ran the iwconfig routine I ran, and HIS card came up and running.

Whatever this glitch is, a lot of folks suffer from it, usually folks who have installed knoppix to their hard drives .
If you find out how to patch the init process to overcome this glitch , please post the solution here !