Ha, at present I'm out of stones.

On my laptop, when the wireless is turned off (physical switch off) I see this from iwconfig:

[GoinEasy9@fedora15kde13 ~]$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11 Nickname:""
Access Point: Not-Associated
Link Quality:5 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0

eth0 no wireless extensions.

Yours says "Managed Access Point", is that how it was advertised? I'm just wondering, because, it may be a problem. I'm going to have to read over that link I gave you to see if there are more answers. I'm wondering if there's a way to switch off the access point and just use the wireless adapter. I've got appointments this afternoon, I'll see if I can come up with something a little later.

It seems the Access Point is referred to as to whether it is present or not, my iwconfig when wireless is enabled.

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11 Nickname:""
Access Point: Not-Associated
Link Quality:3 Signal level:188 Noise level:165
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0

eth0 no wireless extensions.

So, I'm not certain if your usb stick is meant to be a access point or not. When I see Access Point I always think back to my own problems. Anyway.

In order to get my wireless up and running on Fedora 15, I had to click on the icon for Network Manager and check off enable wireless. Even though my wireless switch was on (computer switch), I still had to enable it in Network Manager. Since my router uses WPA2 security, I also had to go into Network Manager and set up the security to match the router. It was a bit frustrating because I would assume that Network Manager would automatically enable the wireless after the switch on my computer for wireless was turned on, but, it took me configuring Network Manager for it to work.

If you click on the Network Manager icon, the "enable wireless" checkbox should be on the bottom left.

As that long thread showed in my original post, this wifi chip and the corresponding driver are problematic. At least you have the driver installed and it did originally work. BTW - My Network window says Network Connections also, it is, in fact, Network Manager., just so we know that we're talking about the same thing.

I haven't had time to go through that thread to see if there are any tweaks that could be done. At the moment just make sure wireless is checked and enabled and "Connect Automatically" is checked in Network Connections under the Wireless (use the edit function to look into your connection), and hope we can come up with a tweak to make sure the connection doesn't drop once initiated. You could also experiment with wicd, although I haven't used that in a while, you never know, since you now have the driver installed, if it will work better.

I'll let you know if I find anything else.

Tom