I'm having a devil of a time getting my wireless usb adapter working with Knoppix 3.6. Anyone want to help?

I read over Grant's sticky post and got nowhere.

I'm using the CDROM supplied .sys and .inf files.

ndiswrapper -i /etc/netgear/netwg111.inf
returns Installing netwg111.
ndiswrapper -l returns "Installed ndis drivers: netwg111", thus I assume this worked.

modprobe ndiswrapper returns no response (which I guess is expected)

Modprobe -l shows wlan.ko, ndiswrapper.ko, usbnet.ko, usbcore.ko, among others. Don't know what is or is not important here.

iwconfig wlan0 essid any
returns "Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A). Set failed on device wlan0; no such device."

I assumed I'm hosed at this point.

iwconfig wlan0 channel 11
returns same error.

ifconfig wlan0 up
returns no such device. ifconfig returns data for eth0 and l0, but nothing resembling a wireless connection.

What am I doing wrong?

I'm not the smartest tool in the linux shed. I've done a little unix work and have (years ago) installed linux from floppies w/o networking.

Thanks in advance.