The state of the art is poor here. I've been working for a few hours to try and find drivers for an SMC 2662 v3 USB wireless adapter.
Theres.. a -lot- of different drivers, few seem to work, the one that I got to work seems to act well with wireless extentions. *sigh* (chalk off the binary-only "official" driver, the Sourceforge one hung the system (not the usb-uhci issue), the berlios one was the only thing I got to work (But not with hotplug. enable hotplug and it dropped again. )
One of theese days I'll retry with hotplug and kernel 2.6, it appears to have internal drivers for the at76c50x cards.
wireless-tools worked though. yey. But I can't check the link quality. I hate software.