I installed Ubuntu Studio on my cousin's laptop over the weekend, which is a Toshiba Satellite Pro, which has the Atheros chip set. I noticed it was marked down as an unclaimed device when running:

lspci -v

In the end I noticed that in the Hardware Drivers (under the System > Administration menu) there was something called Madwifi enabled. I disabled this, rebooted and it then worked fine. You might wish to check that you haven't also got Madwifi as the driver for your wireless adapter. If you still have problems, you may have to blacklist a driver to prevent it being used.