SMC 2635W/ADMtek wifi adapter

I recently purchased an SMC 2635W wifi PCMCIA card to use with my
laptop running Redhat 7.3. I downloaded the 7.3 driver (V1.03) from
the ADMtek website, and the V1.05 source. Installation of the driver
went smoothly. Plug in the card and the PC beeps, lsmod then shows
the 8211.o driver has been added to the kernel. Running 'ifconfig
eth1 up' causes the LED on the card to begin blinking rapidly, so
everything appears to be working - but it cannot find a network. I
sat in the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble, watching other people
using their laptops, and kwifimanager says there is no signal. (Under
WinXP on the same laptop, same SMC 2635W, NetStumbler reports a nice
signal.)

Both kwifimanager and iwconfig report a noise level of zero -
here is the output from iwconfig, with the laptop sitting next to a
running microwave oven!

# ifconfig eth0 down
# ifconfig eth1 up
# iwconfig eth1
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:""
NWIDff/any Mode:Managed Channel:0
Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00Bit Rate=0kb/s Tx-Power=47
dBm
Sensitivity:0/65535
Retry limit:3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

There is no way the noise level could be zero in that
environment.

Also, attempting to change the receive sensitivity via iwconfig
does not work - 'iwconfig eth1 -80' and 'iwconfig eth1 -60' both leave
the sensitivity set at 0/65535. This may be unrelated, or it might be
significant.

My next step was to compile the V1.05 source and copy the new
8211.o to the /lib... location, but this didn't change anything.

I am really open to suggestions.

Leslie