Two devices but only one card

Hi, I am converting to Mepis 100% but have encountered an "oddness". I have an Airlink 101 4130 card (Atheros chipset) and I'm using Mepis 6.5 - 64. The trouble is Ath0 is installed and recognised but will not function unless I also make Wifi0 active but there is nothing on Wifi0. This setup works (I'm using it right now to write this) but is not very stable and requires periodic reboots or restarts.

I'm not sure where to go with this. All I can think of is to try removing the MadWifi drivers and trying the ndiswrapper if I can get it all figured out. Does anyone have a thought??

Thanks in advance

Earl

The gory details

SYSTEM
Foxconn nforce 680i motherboard
Intel E6600 CPU
2 Gigs PC6400 ram
nVidia 7600 video
320 Gig sata
ata DVDRW

relevent section of "lspci -v"

0000:04:09.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Subsystem: Unknown device 1948:3a02
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 21
Memory at feae0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

ifconfig

ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:18:02:3F:80:74
inet addr:192.168.10.2 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::218:2ff:fe3f:8074/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:7111 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1870 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1793192 (1.7 MiB) TX bytes:269796 (263.4 KiB)

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:6C:04:06:17
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:18 Base address:0xe000

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:6C:04:06:18
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:20 Base address:0x6000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:283 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:283 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:25704 (25.1 KiB) TX bytes:25704 (25.1 KiB)

wifi0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-18-02-3F-80-74-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:192.168.10.2 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:47478 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:39337
TX packets:11641 errors:88 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:5681842 (5.4 MiB) TX bytes:824064 (804.7 KiB)
Interrupt:21 Memory:ffffc20000060000-ffffc20000070000

and the best for last

iwconfig

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wifi0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"dragonnest" Nickname:"default"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.457 GHz Access Point: 00:0C:E5:4F:53:ED
Bit Rate:1 Mb/s Tx-Power:18 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:6F68-7468-6973-6761-7465-6B65-79 Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality=7/94 Signal level=-86 dBm Noise level=-93 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:1 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

eth1 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.