wireless half of bridge stops responding - forever more

i have a system acting as a bridge between a cat5 eth0 and a 802.11b eth1.

i can ping the bridge's ip from both sides at first. but after ~5
mintues eth1 stops responding. i can no longer ping to or from that
interface.

the further oddity is that after the wireless card stops responding, i
have to eject the card and reinsert it to get it to ping out again.
even after taking the bridge down, taking down all the cards, and
bringing up just the wireless card, it will not ping again. i bring up
the card the same way after re-inserting or taking all the interfaces
down, i'm quite certain it has the same configuration in both cases.

i have no idea whats going on. please help.

linux 2.6.5-mm1 on debian testing.

myren