Observation on MA301 and dropping link

I have sucessfully installed (and am using at this moment) a NetGear
MA301 (Prism II based) wireless PCI ethernet adapter using the Orinico
driver.

I have noticed that when I run GNOME(Nautilus)/OpenOffice
Writer/Mozilla I experience problems, specifically I begin to see
messages relating to failure to write to the BAP. This begins to
consume an enormous amount of CPU to the point where I need to
shutdown and restart my machine.

HOWEVER, When I use IceWM with Opera, and TextMaker (which have a much
smaller footprint, and consume much less CPU) I never see this
problem.

I am running on an old P55C (Celeron 366) on an AI5TV MB with 96M of
RAM and two oldish MAXTOR hard disks (quite slow).

What I am trying to understand is if it is really possible that the
Orinoco driver is being starved as a result of the bloated inneficient
code in the Gnome/OpenOffice/Mozilla combination, or do I possibly
have a configuration problem with the orinoco driver