[ltp] ipw2200 + Intel Pro Wireless 2915 a/b/g: "ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting."

[fire-eyes]

I am having a very irritating problem with the wireless driver and card
above. Sometimes, but not all the times, it gets into this phase where
the wireless drops, comes back, drops, comes back (etc) and eventually I
start seeing this in kernel logs:

ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

Unloading and reloading the module does not stop the issue, when it has
begun. I have done some searching, and the typical advice is to make
sure hardware crypto is off, by loading it like so:

modprobe -v ipw2200 hwcrypto=0

However this never stops it, or even causes it to calm down a bit.

The most frustrating thing, is that this does not happen all the time. I
use multiple wireless networks. All of them wide open, except for one,
which was mine at home with WPA. That AP since bricked (warning: avoid
LInksys WRT54G v5's, i'm not the only one this happened to) so I can no
loner test. But when I used it, i saw the same things as I am describing
here.

Software and Hardware information:
IBM Thinkpad T43
Intel Pro Wireless 2915 a/b/g
Kernel 2.6.18.1-ifc (ifc is a very small intel fan control patch)
ipw2200-1.2.0
ipw2200-firmware-3.0
wpa_supplicant-0.5.5

Any ideas out there? I have talked to others who have seen this, and
none of them ever solved it...

Gentoo Specific Information (some of this may be useful to others too)

Portage 2.1.2_pre3-r3 (default-linux/x86/2006.1/desktop, gcc-4.1.1,
glibc-2.4-r3, 2.6.18.1-ifc i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.18.1-ifc i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz
Gentoo Base System version 1.12.5
Last Sync: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 02:20:01 +0000
distcc 2.18.3 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632)
[enabled]
ccache version 2.3 [enabled]
app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present]
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.0.30
dev-lang/python:     2.4.3-r4
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5
dev-util/ccache:     2.3
dev-util/confcache:  [Not Present]
sys-apps/sandbox:    1.2.18.1
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.60
sys-devel/automake:  1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2
sys-devel/binutils:  2.17
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.13-r4
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.22
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.17-r1
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-m -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/NX/etc /usr/NX/home /usr/kde/3.5/env
/usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/X11/xkb
/usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/
/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/
/usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf
/etc/java-config/vms/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo"
CXXFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-m -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig ccache distcc distlocks metadata-transfer sandbox
sfperms strict"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/
ftp://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ ftp://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo
http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo"
LINGUAS="en"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times
--compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats
--timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 3dnow X a52 alsa berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 cairo cdr chroot cli
cracklib crypt dbus dlloader dri dv dvd dvdr dvdread eds elibc_glibc
emboss encode fam ffmpeg firefox flac fortran gdbm gif gpm gstreamer gtk
gtk2 hal input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse
input_devices_synaptics isdnlog jpeg kde kdeenablefinal kernel_linux
libg++ linguas_en mad mikmod mmx mp3 mpeg ncurses network nls nptl
nptlonly ogg opengl oss pam pcre pdflib perl png ppds pppd pwdb python
qt3 qt4 quicktime readline reflection sdl session spell spl sse ssl svg
theora tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode usb
userland_GNU video_cards_ati video_cards_fglrx video_cards_radeon vorbis
win32codecs xml xml2 xorg xv xvid zlib"
Unset:  CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL,
LDFLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS